


Getting Over It

by The_Cool_Aunt



Category: Sherlock (TV)
Genre: Drug Addiction, Gen, Past Child Abuse, Sherlock Whump, Sick Sherlock, Sickfic
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-03-31
Updated: 2015-03-31
Packaged: 2018-03-20 12:26:12
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 21
Words: 70,783
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3650286
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/The_Cool_Aunt/pseuds/The_Cool_Aunt
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>After he takes down the last of Moriarty's web, John realizes that something is not right with Sherlock.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Not Over It

John couldn’t get over it. And that was saying a lot.  
  
Because Dr John Watson had gotten over many things in his lifetime. He had gotten over his experiences in Afghanistan and subsequent PTSD and psychosomatic limp. He had gotten over the (apparent) suicide of his best friend and subsequent (apparent) resurrection. He had gotten over his tendency to be kidnapped, especially by his best friend’s brother (and that his best friend’s brother had minions—well, of _course_ he did). He had gotten over the (actual) death of his best friend, the fact that it was his own wife who had shot him, and his (actual) return from the dead. Twice. The fact that he was the reason his best friend came back. The fact that his assassin/wife was expecting a child. The fact that his best friend was, in point of fact, a giant dickhead. (That last one he sometimes had to sit quietly and contemplate, because no matter what it said about his friend, what did it say about _him?_ )  
  
Yes, John was quite the expert at getting over things; rolling with the punches.  
  
But what he found he couldn’t get over—and he did try, sitting and contemplating or sometimes watching _Dr Who_ —was the fact that his admittedly _odd_ best friend’s parents were… ordinary.  
  
Completely. Utterly. Rather adorably ordinary and even bordering on a bit boring. Mycroft and Sherlock Holmes’ parents were _average._  
  
The first time he’d met them, he hadn’t even realized who they were. Sherlock being Sherlock, he didn’t have any photos of them of which John was aware ( _sentiment, John,_ he heard that deep voice intone). He had thought they were actually clients—a completely ordinary older couple seeking the consulting detective’s assistance with some sort of puzzle. That is, until Sherlock had essentially panicked at his arrival and rushed them out of 221B.  
  
The two things that struck John—that _stayed_ with him—were: 1) Based on appearances, they most certainly _were_ Sherlock’s parents. He could see immediately where the man had gotten his build, his graceful hands, his unreal cheekbones, and his unique eyes; and 2) Those two people, with their chatter about the remainder of their stay in London and _Les Mis_ and Sherlock keeping in touch, most certainly could _not_ be Sherlock’s parents. Because the only way John could reconcile the utterly innocuous pair with the frankly ridiculous man they had produced… well, the only explanation the doctor could come up with involved the plot of a 1950s science fiction movie.  
  
Then life got a bit dicey, and for a while John didn’t think about it much.  
  
But now John had a bit of breathing space. Sherlock had gotten out of hospital (officially this time and not actually bleeding internally). Mary and the baby growing inside her were healthy, even if their relationship wasn’t quite there yet. They had gotten through the most peculiar Christmas Day John was ever likely to have (although he didn’t exactly promise himself that—there was always next year). And after the _sturm und drang_ of the case of Charles Augustus Magnussen and Sherlock’s subsequent four-minute banishment, things were settling down a bit.  
  
Mary was getting quite big now. Other than a rather constant backache and the need to visit the loo every thirty minutes, she felt quite well. They were talking now. She was still managing to work at the surgery on the weekdays, which she wanted to do until the birth, even if she did tend to knock things off the front desk with her stomach.  
  
John’s own work schedule had settled into its old, pre-disappearance-of-Sherlock chaos. He was back to dashing after the madman through the streets of London at a moment’s notice. To slipping his (still illegal and how Mycroft had gotten it back for him was something he did _not_ contemplate) revolver into his pocket and, with a grin, jumping into a cab and heading for a crime scene. Back to blogging about the cases he could reveal (Sherlock’s work not being restricted to his brother’s governmental and therefore top-secret tasks).  
  
And what was equally good was the fact that Sherlock was busy. Very busy. Almost too busy, truth be told. He ate little and slept less, but he was never bored. And an intrigued Sherlock was a (rather indecently) happy Sherlock. A _clean_ Sherlock. Life was rather glorious.  
  
So one evening after a bit of an adventure in an empty house, which had ended in a joyous reunion of a sweet, dark-haired little girl and her young mother, John found himself on the sofa in 221B, unpacking the takeaway onto the coffee table while Sherlock rummaged for clean utensils. ( _Mind they are actually clean,_ John had reminded him and received some lovely eye-rolling in return, which made him grin.) He had already texted Mary to let her know they were safe and sound.  
  
“Oh, and bring wine glasses,” John called.  
  
Sherlock frowned and spun around. “What for?”  
  
John reached down and picked up a bag that he had put on the floor next to the sofa. “I picked this up,” he added, unnecessarily, as the shape of the wine bottle was apparent.  
  
Sherlock, sated with his latest success and therefore much less likely to whine about John’s middling tastes than usual, nodded in appreciation, fished around in the cabinets, and pulled out two wine glasses. He looked at them closely, then rather guiltily put one in the sink and got another one out. He wandered back into the sitting room and sat next to John, handing him the glasses and eagerly picking up one of the takeaway containers.  
  
John opened the bottle with the corkscrew on his Swiss Army knife and poured some for each of them. They nipped into the takeaway. John congratulated himself for thinking of the wine; he knew better than to offer Sherlock beer. Rather memorable effect that had on him, beer did. And Mrs Hudson was fond of the carpet.  
  
Oh, he did sometimes truly miss this bachelor-flat-wilderness sort of living. He and Sherlock had simply each taken a fork, picked up a box, and dug in. Swapped boxes with each other. Ate more. At one point John laughingly offered Sherlock a dumpling stabbed on his own fork, and the detective had bitten down smartly on it, grinning.  
  
“Oh, that was lovely,” John groaned after a bit, sitting back on the sofa with a contented sigh.  
  
“I do like a good Chinese,” Sherlock agreed, licking his thumb.  
  
“It’s good to see you eat,” John ventured. He had been trying not to nag. He picked up his glass.  
  
“John, you sound like my mother!” Sherlock griped, taking a sip of the wine. John nearly choked on his. “What?” the detective queried suspiciously.  
  
John cleared his throat and put down his glass, casually starting to pack up the leftovers. “I should head home,” he commented.  
  
“No. Don’t bother. It’s far too late.” Sherlock poured each of them another glass of wine. John looked at him questioningly. “By the time you find a cab and get home, you’ll be exhausted and you’ll wake Mary. Stay.”  
  
John glanced at his watch and thought about it. As usual, Sherlock was right. He was already knackered, to be honest, and the idea of going back out into the cold, dark night, searching for a cab, and travelling all the way to the quiet house in the suburbs did not appeal to him at all at that moment.  
  
“All right, yeah. Sounds good. I’ll just text Mary…” he added. He rose and walked over to where his jacket hung, pulling his mobile out of the pocket.  
  
Staying here tonight  
  
He tossed the mobile onto the coffee table and picked up the boxes of take away, which Sherlock had completed closing up. “Any surprises in the fridge?” he asked with a grin as he headed for the kitchen.  
  
“Hmm? Actually, yes,” Sherlock replied, impassively.  
  
John steeled himself. He had seen eyeballs, thumbs, a foot, and of course an entire human head in that fridge, in addition to the more mundane colonies of highly toxic bacteria. He swung the door open in slight trepidation.  
  
And his mouth fell open.  
  
Sherlock chuckled.  
  
The fridge was spotless. It gleamed. It was nearly empty, granted, but a container of milk stood proudly on its own in the center of the top shelf. John nearly dropped the take away. “What’s all this, then?” he laughed.  
  
“Mrs Hudson can be quite coercive when she wants to be,” Sherlock admitted.  
  
“Did she threaten to not bring you any more biscuits?” John slid the boxes into the cold space.  
  
“Oh, much worse. I’m still not convinced she wasn’t running that drug cartel for her husband.” Sherlock bent over and took off his ludicrously expensive shoes, then rose and removed his elegant suit jacket. He padded over to his armchair, wine in hand, and flopped down. John joined him, kicking off his loafers, picking up his wine, and dropping happily into his chair. Its worn contours cradled him comfortably, and he sighed in contentedness.  
  
“And the milk? How did you know I’d be here for breakfast?”  
  
“Simple enough. When I texted you to join me, I calculated how long it would take to accomplish our task, and then how tired you would be based on the number of times you’ve mentioned being woken up by Mary being uncomfortable in the past week.”  
  
“Of course you did.” John shook his head and chuckled. Sherlock was in an absolutely delightful mood, coming down from the high of the case but not yet bottoming out in the misery of boredom. Maybe John would be able to get him to play a bit; it had been ages since he heard the multitalented man on his violin. But something else occurred to him.  
  
“You know, Sherlock, you never did tell me how you got in involved in all that—with Mrs Hudson, I mean.”  
  
Sherlock waved one long-fingered hand in a languid fashion. “Dull. You’ll have to ask her. I’m surprised she hasn’t told you herself.”  
  
“Well, I didn’t want to pry,” John attempted. He gave up and shook his head. “She has told me some of what her husband was up too—right bastard by the sound of it. But nothing about how you got involved.” He paused and considered it, then shook his head. “No. I just couldn’t. There’s something indecent about asking your landlady for the gory details of her drug-running husband’s prosecution and execution.”  
  
Sherlock looked thoughtful for a second. “Not good?”  
  
“A bit, yeah.”  
  
Sherlock nodded solemnly, obviously storing that information in the room in his mind palace labeled “Things John thinks are A Bit Not Good.” It was getting fairly full.  
  
*  
  
“I’m fagged,” John finally admitted, his last yawn practically dislocating his jaw. “And you look about ready to fall over. Come on. Bedtime.”  
  
“Mmph,” Sherlock agreed. John had convinced him to play a bit, and he was now returning his violin to its case. “Your bed’s made up.”  
  
“All right then.” He rose and headed for the bathroom. He had a toothbrush, razor, and a few changes of clothing stashed at the flat for just such an occasion. He didn’t consider it odd or surprising that his bed was ready for him. He had learned from Mrs Hudson that almost immediately after Sherlock had returned from his “hiatus,” he had asked her to take care of it for him (well, not so much asked as assumed—both that she would do it and there would be a need for it to be done). At first John had been angry, and then bemused, and then finally, the first time he crashed there, grateful.  
  
He trudged up the narrow steps as Sherlock headed to his own bedroom. Changed and slid himself between the cool sheets. And fell asleep approximately two minutes after his head hit the pillow.  
  
Sherlock glanced up at the ceiling of his bedroom. He listened to John’s steady footsteps across the room, then the creak of the bed. He carefully hung up his suit and slid into something soft and worn and perfect for sleeping. Then silence. He smiled to himself as he essentially fell face-first on top of his duvet.  
  
The two men slept, and dreamt…  
  


> _John, you sound like my mother._
> 
> _Somebody’s put a bullet in my boy, and if I ever find out who,  
>  I shall turn absolutely monstrous._
> 
> _So you realise that Sherlock got us out here to see his mum and dad for a reason?_
> 
> _His lovely mum and dad. A fine example of married life. I get that._
> 
> _Until we met other children._
> 
> _Oh yes, that was a mistake._
> 
> _So, why would a man who has never knowingly closed the door  
>  without the direct orders of his mother bother to do so on this occasion?_
> 
> _Ghastly. What were they thinking?_
> 
> _Probably something about trying to make friends._
> 
> _Have to phone our parents, of course, in Oklahoma. Won’t be the first time  
>  that your substance abuse has wreaked havoc with their line-dancing._
> 
> _Your mother has a lot to answer for._
> 
> _Mmm. I know. I have a list. Mycroft has a file._
> 
> _A complete dickhead…_

Shouting.

John woke up suddenly and completely, an ability he had honed during his years as a medical student and then perfected in the army. He threw off the duvet (God, the new bedding was lovely and very obviously a Sherlock choice; the man was obsessed with thread count) and stumbled out into the hall. The shouting was coming from downstairs, and it was definitely Sherlock. He ran.

And stopped short at the door to Sherlock’s bedroom, which was open.

Sherlock was sitting bolt upright on the bed. His eyes were open, but in the dim light coming in from his bedside lamp John could tell that the younger man wasn’t actually awake. He was clearly agitated, and he appeared to be talking to someone.

“Please! I’m sorry. I really am.”

John shivered, and it wasn’t just because he was fresh out of bed wearing only his pyjamas.

John was familiar with Sherlock’s voice. With all aspects of it, or so he thought. Charming. Amused. Thoughtful. Bored. Sarcastic. Outraged. Appalled. High. But right now, it sounded different than he had ever heard it before. It sounded… young.

“We just went out for a Chinese. I forgot I was supposed to have dinner with your guests.”

John took a step closer, his mouth falling open as Sherlock continued to talk.

“Please don’t make me eat in front your guests. I’m full. I’m sorry. I’m sorry!” Sherlock dropped his face into his shaking hands.

The doctor couldn’t take it any longer. He strode across the room, pressing his legs against the bed. He took his friend’s shoulders in his hands and shook him, gently. “Sherlock. Sherlock? Wake up. Wake up now.”

“No, please don’t make me eat that. I can’t! I’ll be sick. Please don’t!”

“Oh, God, Sherlock. Wake up!”

Sherlock’s eyes shut and he lowered his hands. He breathed deeply a few times. “John?” he finally rumbled.

“Yeah, mate. It’s John. You were… you were having a nightmare.”

Sherlock’s eyes opened again and roved around the room, then down to his shoulders, which John still held. He frowned.

“Oh! Sorry!” John removed his hands guiltily, rubbing them down his pyjama-clad thighs. “Maybe not so much Chinese before bed, yeah?”

Sherlock nodded, scrubbing at his wet cheeks with the heels of his hands.

“You all right?” John had gotten past awkward about seventeen seconds after his first meeting with Sherlock and lost any sense of privacy within seven minutes of officially moving in, so he didn’t think twice about reaching out and brushing Sherlock’s dark curls off his forehead and casually checking his eyes.

“Mmh? Yes. Fine.”

“All right. Why don’t you lie back down?” John replied while covertly checking Sherlock’s pulse. It was racing.

“But…”

“No. You need sleep. Here.”

The ex-army doctor bent and briskly untangled the duvet from under and around Sherlock’s legs, the younger man grunting in protest as John firmly rolled him off it, pulled it back, and rolled him under it. Sherlock’s eyes screwed shut as his head hit the pillow.

“All right now?” John asked.

“I said I’m _fine_ ,” came the choked reply.

John reached out a tentative hand. He frowned at himself. Why tentative? Was this anything he hadn’t done before? Granted, it had been a while, but still… and then the detective made an odd sound. He looked down. Sherlock’s face was a study in misery—those generous lips tight, brows drawn down into a frown. Oh, Sherlock.

He sat on the edge of the bed, reaching out his hand and running it through the dark curls. “It’s all right. I’m here. Just go to sleep.”

He heard Sherlock give a tired sigh as he drifted off.


	2. Cases

“And why didn’t anyone report them as missing for seventy-two hours?” Sherlock spat out, eyes blazing. He was intently examining a window in a bedroom that reeked of well-worn trainers and unwashed clothing.  
  
“They were supposed to be spending their holiday with their father. Mother says when they do that, she often doesn’t hear from them until they’re on their way home or back to school.”  
  
“So why didn’t the father report them missing?” he shot impatiently over his shoulder as he yanked open the wardrobe door and peered in.  
  
“He says he got a text saying they had changed their minds and were joining friends in Bath. The parents don’t communicate directly very often, apparently.”  
  
Sherlock grunted and strode out of the room, striding carelessly over a crumpled pillow. He wheeled into the next bedroom, where he immediately opened a few drawers and looked into the wardrobe. He then went to a laptop on the desk. His fingers flew across its keyboard. He grunted in satisfaction. His eyes rolled, taking in the rest of the room. Finally, a triumphant smile spread across his face.  
  
“They’re fine,” he announced grandly. “They’re staying in separate hotels in Whitstable. I suggest going after the younger one first; he’s more likely to panic and therefore less likely to warn his brother when encountered by the police than the other way around.”  
  
“And how exactly are we supposed to find…”  
  
Sherlock put an imperious hand up. “Oh, please. Don’t be dull.” His long fingers flew over the keyboard of the laptop again as he spoke. “The older one’s staying at the… Premier Inn, and the younger one’s at the… Woolpack Inn.”  
  
The policeman in charge of the scene was on his mobile now. John beamed at Sherlock, who rolled his eyes and managed to look bored before grinning back.  
  
*  
  
“So, tell me,” John demanded, waving a breadstick at Sherlock. Sherlock frowned at the offending baked good before grabbing John’s wrist and taking a bite of it.  
  
“Obvious, John. Teen brothers, two years apart in age. Very different temperaments, hobbies—the only thing they shared was a deep hatred for their father.” He spoke around his mouthful of bread. Honestly, the man’s table manners were horrible.  
  
John thought about it as he nibbled on the remainder of the breadstick.  
  
“Okay,” he replied. “Different temperaments are obvious—one room was a tip and other practically a surgical suite.”  
  
“Good, John. What else?”  
  
“Hobbies… also obvious from their rooms. Younger son—the messy one—Lucas--was into skateboarding, heavy metal music…” he paused, trying to picture the chaotic room in his head. “Oh! And birds.”  
  
Sherlock looked momentarily confused before realization hit him. “Oh. You mean females. Really, John, you must elevate your conversation above the vernacular.”  
  
“Yeah, I’ll get right on that. Anyway, the other brother–Alex was his name?–was into… ermmm… oh! Swimming. A swimmer.”  
  
“You noticed the trophies?”  
  
“Yeah, and the posters.”  
  
Sherlock nodded encouragingly. “Excellent. Now, how did I know where they went?”  
  
John’s face fell a bit. “Not quite sure,” he admitted. “What did you see?”  
  
Lesson over, Sherlock began to rattle off his deductions. John sat back and allowed it to wash over him. This was probably his favorite bit of cases. Well, except for the chases. He liked those a bit more.  
  
“Despite being very different people, the brothers do get along—as I said, most likely due to their shared hatred of their father. They routinely do this—say they’re visiting him while going off somewhere—anywhere—else. Most often they actually do end up in Bath, but this time things were different.”  
  
“What was different?” John asked keenly, leaning forward over the table.  
  
“Weather.”  
  
Ah. John nodded. Yes, south of London had been hit with an unfortunate and unseasonal cold spell and torrential downpours. Not exactly conducive to a holiday.  
  
“All right. So how did you know exactly which hotels…?”  
  
“Obvious. They’d need to go to less expensive establishments; paid in cash. Older brother wanted a hotel with a pool and younger needed one that allowed dogs.”  
  
“Dogs?”  
  
“Mmm. Medium-sized, mixed breed.”  
  
John didn’t need to ask how Sherlock had figured that out. He was familiar with the detective’s methods. Most likely he had observed dog hair in the teen’s room, or photos of the dog, or… whatever it was that Sherlock saw…  
  
“One of those plastic trays that people keep dog dishes on in the room, but no dishes, John.”  
  
Ah.  
  
John’s mobile chimed. He glanced down. Picked up the call. Spoke briefly. Hit “end call.” He looked up expectantly at Sherlock, who had lost interest and was looking at the menu.  
  
“Sherlock?” John prompted.  
  
“Mmm?”  
  
“They’ve been found.”  
  
“Of course they have, John. I told them where to find them.” Sherlock frowned and went back to the menu.  
  
“Sherlock…”  
  
“What?”  
  
“How did you know they both hated their father?”  
  
“I was thinking the penne.”  
  
Ah. Discussion over. All right then.  
  
*  
  
2.46 AM  
  
“What the hell are you doing?” John had demanded, barreling down the stairs and nearly running into Mrs Hudson, who was, despite her hip and her flapping dressing gown, moving quite briskly up from 221A. They both stopped at the door to the sitting room. It was a disaster area. Sherlock, his own dressing gown and worn t-shirt sliding off his thin shoulder, was yanking books off the shelves in handfuls, throwing them as hard as he could at the opposite wall.  
  
“Idiot! Why? Why not just do what he planned? Why get him angry?” he shouted.  
  
“Why get who angry?” John demanded. Sherlock had whirled around. John had rarely seen him so enraged. He put up his hands as a show of surrender. “Easy, Sherlock. Who’s angry?”  
  
And Sherlock’s expression—his whole demeanor--had changed so rapidly if John hadn’t seen it with his own eyes he wouldn’t have believed it. The books he was holding slid from his suddenly still hands, thudding on his bare foot. Mrs Hudson winced in sympathy.  
  
“John?” Mrs… Mrs Hudson. Did I wake you? I’m… I’m sorry.”  
  
And as both of their mouths dropped open in shock, Sherlock had slid limply to the floor, wrapping his arms around his legs and dropping his head onto his knees. He moaned. John was next to him in an instant, skittering precariously over the books.  
  
When he finally got the shaking man to his feet, Mrs Hudson had gone back downstairs, tears in her eyes. John didn’t need to see the track marks or the dilated eyes to know what had happened.  
  
“Oh, Sherlock, not this again. Please.”  
  
But the young man had refused to say another word and in the morning demanded that John leave. The books had remained as they were for another week.  
  
*  
  
“This one’s pretty grim,” Lestrade warned them. Sherlock nodded faintly, not really seeming to notice. He strode ahead impatiently as John and Lestrade, startled, paused and then ran after him.  
  
“For future reference, that was an understatement,” John muttered, his hand over his nose and mouth.  
  
“Sorry, mate,” Lestrade muttered back, doing the same. It _was_ an understatement. Anything involving children always was. Sherlock didn’t seem to notice, though, swooping through the scene, gathering data, making deductions, as he always did.  
  
After a minute examination of the body and the area around it, he snapped shut his magnifying glass.  
  
“Arrest the father,” he stated firmly.  
  
“What?” Lestrade nearly shouted.  
  
“Arrest the girl’s father.”  
  
They stared at each other for about ten seconds.  
  
“Could you explain why?” Lestrade finally asked, defeated.  
  
“Of course I can,” Sherlock scoffed. “Do you need me to?”  
  
“Sherlock,” John interjected, warningly.  
  
Sherlock rolled his eyes, and then launched into his deductions.  
  
“Female, just turned 16. Knew her abductor—well. No bruises except those caused by the cuffs. She didn’t resist before she was cuffed to the radiator. No defensive wounds. Her feet were free and bare, but no evidence that she tried to kick anything or anyone. Not willing to admit the entire situation was happening. Not willing to injure her abductor. So, someone she trusted and didn’t want to injure despite being handcuffed to a radiator, burned with cigarettes, and left to starve to death in her own filth for over a week. Her mother reported her missing. You have her statement. You didn’t mention her father being involved in the investigation at all, which is odd, isn’t it? So, arrest the father.”  
  
John nearly gagged.  
  
“Sherlock…” Lestrade said in a strangled voice.  
  
“What? She had just turned the age of consent. It must have triggered something in him. Oh, I don’t know. Psychology. Dull. He probably owns the building, though, if you need ‘evidence’ of the connection. Come on, John,” the detective urged, looking vaguely bored. “Angelo’s?”  
  
Another night at Baker Street. At dinner Sherlock had been oddly distracted. He had refused to sit at their usual table in the front window, pushing his way to a booth in the back instead. He wasn’t interested in sharing his deductions with the doctor (which in this case was fine with John, to be honest—he had no interest whatsoever in mentally revisiting that particular crime scene) and picked at his dinner despite it being one of his favorites. Still—always—he smiled affectionately at Angelo as the man fussed over them. At one point John had casually pushed his plate toward the detective, knowing that Sherlock enjoyed stealing his food. Nothing. John had frowned and then quite deliberately loaded up his fork with the frankly delicious tortellini in cream sauce that was doing his waistline no good whatsoever and that normally Sherlock would be unable to resist—particularly because it was on John’s plate and not Sherlock’s. He held the fork at mouth level as he talked about whatever it was he was blathering about. It didn’t matter at this point. No bite.  
  
Eventually John couldn’t stand it any longer. “Oi!” he exclaimed.  
  
“What?” Sherlock frowned.  
  
“Want a bite?” John asked enticingly.  
  
“No. Dull,” Sherlock commented. And then he took John’s wrist in his bony fingers and wrapped his lips around the curled bit of pasta. And smiled. A genuine smile.  
  
John smiled back and casually found a way of checking Sherlock’s pulse in the next few minutes. Nothing he hadn’t done before. He knew that if Sherlock was “on” there was no way he’d get away with doing that, but he had learned to read the younger man. Signs of fatigue: Pauses in speech. Eyes skittish; searching the restaurant. The faintest of trembling of his hands. A shudder as his ill-insulated body struggled to digest what little he’d eaten.  
  
He laid his firm, steady hand on the detective’s wrist. Pulse: Rapid and weak.  
  
Okay. Time to head out. Angelo wrapped up their leftovers himself, his usual grin muted. He looked into John’s eyes and John made the smallest shake of his head that he could manage. The restaurant owner and ex-house-breaker didn’t noticeably respond, but John was fairly certain that the bag he took held more food than just Sherlock’s mostly-uneaten dinner.  
  
Back to Baker Street.  
  
And this time, he had texted Mary ahead of time, as Sherlock was hailing a cab.  
  
Bit not good. Staying over.  
  
And Mary had texted back, immediately:  
  
Danger night?  
  
And John, feeling a bit guilty, had texted his reply as he settled back into the deep seat of the cab:  
  
I think so  
  
And then he deleted the texts as Sherlock drummed his long, white fingers impatiently on his knee, staring out at London at night.  
  
*  
  
1.42 AM  
  
“Sherlock? Sherlock, it’s okay. I’m here.”  
  
Strangled sounds.  
  
“Come on. Breathe.”  
  
Worse sounds. John swore and swooped over to the corner of the room and back again in just a few steps.  
  
“Here,” he said soothingly. “Got a bin.”  
  
It was not a comment on Angelo’s food.  
  
*  
  
3.46 AM  
  
“It’s probably some bug,” John offered, rubbing slow circles between Sherlock’s shoulder blades as he heaved uselessly into the toilet. “It’s okay.”  
  
Both of them knew it was a lie.  
  
*  
  
5.13 AM  
  
Crap. Crap. Crap. He had fallen asleep. And now the great git was gone. At least now he knew where to look.  
  
8.31 AM  
  
He had looked. Found. Shouted. Hauled out. Wanted to close his eyes to the dilated pupils; wanted not to feel the racing pulse. And then the joy of force-feeding him painkillers for the headache that was sure to come and trying to ignore the insults that the man was hurling at him at a dizzying speed. Finally, he called Mary.  
  
“Are you all right?” she asked. He explained. Haltingly. Swallowing frequently. Mary listened patiently. She didn’t ask any questions and didn’t interrupt. Finally, he struggled to the end; to where they were now. “All right. Come home when you can,” she said finally.  
  
He hit “end call” and looked over his shoulder at the too-thin, too-pale man, who had finally crashed and was currently out like a light on the sofa.  
  
All right. He had to head out. Head home. Head to work.  
  
He didn’t want to leave.  
  
He sat back down in his chair.  
  
He didn’t notice when the tears spilled out over his cheeks.  
  
He didn’t leave.  
  
*  
  
“Christ,” John whistled. Sherlock said nothing, taking in the scene with his brilliant eyes. They were in the dining room of a fairly average bungalow. It was a wreck. There was so much food strewn around, and so much broken china, that the corpse seated at the head of the table was almost unnoticeable. “Bit of a domestic, then?” John wondered. Lestrade gave him a look.  
  
Sherlock was on his hands and knees, examining the carpet with his magnifying lens. That pose reminded John of something, but he couldn’t quite place it.  
  
Next the detective, snapping on gloves, approached the corpse. He was balding, of average height and weight, a bit paunchy. He was dressed in decent grey trousers and a white dress shirt. His dark green tie was loosened. Black dress socks. No shoes. He was slumped back and sideways in the chair, which had arms, or he would surely have tumbled to the floor. Sherlock looked at the chair carefully.  
  
He stood bolt upright, then dashed out of the room. He glanced at a coat rack that stood next to the front door. Glared along a hall, then strode down it. He leaned into a room. Back out and back into the dining room.  
  
“It was natural causes,” he declared, pulling off the gloves.  
  
“What?” Lestrade spat out.  
  
“A postmortem will show that the so-called victim died of a heart attack.”  
  
“Then what’s with all the food? Wife said she came home to find him like this.”  
  
“Oh, she’s lying.”  
  
“All right. Run me through it then, eh?” The D.I. ran a hand through his silver hair, spiking it up.  
  
“She’s having an affair. The wife. Husband comes home early from work. Takes off his jacket and shoes; loosens his tie. Walks into their bedroom and catches them in the act. Has a heart attack and drops dead. Wife does not want to expose herself (and John, I did not mean for that to come out that way and don’t you dare put it in your blog) so she and her lover set up the rather bizarre scenario in the dining room, then drag him into it. He’s got some broken china under him on the chair, so it was there before he was. There are marks in the carpet where his feet dragged. Presumably she figured that setting this up would give a different reason for his heart attack—some sort of odd food fight with an intruder? I don’t know—and no one would question her role in it.”  
  
“Why would…?” Lestrade started.  
  
Sherlock glared at him. “How should I know?” he spat out viciously. Anderson, who was taking photos, jumped. “Guilt? What does it matter? She didn’t even bother making the bed.”  
  
He threw the used gloves at Anderson and stormed out, leaving a startled John to dash out after him.  
  
*  
  
“It’s okay. It’s fine. You’ll be fine,” John murmured.  
  
Oh, how he missed the puking. That was easy, in retrospect. Tangible. Something he could help with.  
  
The nightmares were something different. And the unpredictability of Sherlock’s reaction to his ministrations was exhausting.  
  
Some nights he shouted and thrashed out, throwing whatever was in reach as hard as he could.  
  
Some nights he pouted and stropped and pushed his blogger away.  
  
And then there were nights like this. Nights when he clung to John, sobbing and swearing that I’ll be a good boy, Father, and please don’t cut me. I’ll clean up the broken plate. I’m sorry. It was an accident. I’ll be more careful. Please don’t cut me anymore.  
  
Those nights, John felt like puking himself.  
  



	3. Baby Steps

Well, then. Mary had, in her usual capable way, given birth to a healthy baby girl. John had cried and Mrs Hudson had cried. Mycroft (or more likely Anthea) had sent an extremely generous gift. As had the Scotland Yard folks.  
  
Mary had fussed about the grossness of a few things (piles being the worst offender, apparently), then settled into being a mother the way she had settled into being a medical receptionist. The way she had settled into being a wife. The way she had settled into being an assassin. Calm, competent, and outspoken. John adored her and the baby and walked around in a cloud of euphoria for days.  
  
Sherlock had gone entirely off-grid for two weeks.  
  
John was so sleep-deprived that for two weeks, he didn’t actually notice. It took a call from Mrs Hudson to wake him up.  
  
“Hello?” He felt an unwelcome pang of fear in his chest.  
  
“Oh, John!” the familiar voice was fluttery; anxiety-ridden.  
  
“Mrs Hudson? What’s wrong?” he queried.  
  
“It’s…” She paused, trying to compose herself. She took a deep, shuddering breath. “It’s Sherlock. He hasn’t been home in ages. Weeks. Not since…”  
  
The Pause.  
  
Crap. John knew what was coming next. Not since the baby was born. His baby. Why was it always his fault?  
  
All right. He knew the drill.  
  
It took three stops this time.  
  
“Oh, Sherlock,” he had whispered, holding the bone-thin man against him. “Why? What’s got you so scared? Never mind. I’m here. It’s all right. Let’s get you home. Mrs Hudson is worried sick about you.”  
  
John never wanted to remember those two days. Two days of John holding Sherlock’s head; his hand. Of tempting the scarecrow-thin detective with Mrs Hudson’s jammie dodgers and endless cups of tea. Angelo’s most exquisite, ethereal angel hair pasta with a whisper-light sauce. Of fending off Mycroft’s and Lestrade’s and Mary’s messages. Of missing two days in his newborn daughter’s life.  
  
Of Sherlock screaming.  
  
Of what he was screaming about.  
  
“Come on, Sherlock. Tell me what’s wrong,” John urged. His daughter was two weeks old, his wife’s stomach was returning to normal, and he was in his old bachelor flat, his arm around the too-thin shoulders of his former flatmate.  
  
“I didn’t, Father. I would never get a girl pregnant,” the detective shouted. And then, even worse: “No! I am clearly not the father! I would never… Father! I would never do that with a _girl_.”  
  
John frenetically stroked the dark curls; the sheet-white skin, murmuring indulgences. “It’s all right, Sherlock.” He tried not to look at the track marks that marred both arms, but it was nearly impossible when the younger man jerked them up in front of his face in a clearly defensive pose.  
  
“No! Please stop. Please stop. I didn’t. It was that new boy, I swear. The one with the scar on his forehead. I’m sure it was him. Not me. NOT ME!” And the detective, who possessed one of the most brilliant minds in the country, moaned, words slipping beyond his capability.  
  
John turned toward Sherlock, grabbing his shoulders. “Sherlock!” he shouted. “Come on! Wake up! Wake up now. It’s a dream. You’re having a bad dream. Wake up. It’s John. You’re home. You’re safe. Wake up.”  
  
Sherlock’s moans quieted down, and his eyes, which were open, drooped shut.  
  
“That’s it. It’s just a dream. Shush now.”  
  
The eyes—those exquisite, unearthly eyes—opened again slowly. Sherlock focused slowly on John, who nodded encouragingly.  
  
John felt no shame whatsoever when he gathered the shaking and pale man into his arms and gently stroked his hair, murmuring soft words of calm until, with a sigh, Sherlock fell asleep again.  
  
*  
  
They gazed at the body of the middle-aged woman where it rested in the boot of her own Mercedes. John groaned. They had been so close. He checked her gently with his gloved hands. She was cool but not cold. Hours. They had missed saving her by a few hours.  
  
“God. What went wrong?” he murmured to himself. Then cursed himself silently as Sherlock’s incredible hearing picked up on it.  
  
“Wrong?! I was stupid. Slow. Idiot!” he berated himself, grinding his teeth and spitting the words out like acid.  
  
“What? No, Sherlock! You were… everything we needed. It would have been days otherwise,” Lestrade interceded, observing far more than the body of the wife of a wealthy man, found in a car boot when a ransom drop that her husband was attempting on his own had gone wrong. The husband was dead, too, and the ransom note that was found on his body (turned out his cause of death was a stroke) was written in a code that apparently only he had understood.  
  
“If I had been ‘everything you needed’ three hours sooner, John would now currently be performing life-saving techniques, not a postmortem. We’re done here, John,” Sherlock hissed.  
  
“All right. Give me a minute…” John murmured, straightening up and stripping off his gloves. Then looking around in bewilderment and alarm. “Fuck!”  
  
Lestrade nearly wrenched his neck turning at the doctor’s exclamation. He had been huddled in consultation with Anderson and Donovan, describing to them exactly what type of evidence they needed to collect. His eyes opened wide and his mouth fell open as he rapidly scanned the crime scene.  
  
No gangly madman in a dramatic coat.  
  
Fuck, indeed.  
  
“Sherlock?!” Lestrade shouted.  
  
“I’m on it,” John exclaimed. “I’ll call you when I find him.”  
  
“He’s in bad shape, isn’t he?” Lestrade muttered, pushing away his colleagues to talk to the shorter man as quietly as he could. “I shouldn’t even be calling him if he’s not clean.”  
  
John looked anguished, running his hand through his bristling hair. “It’s been really bad lately, yeah, but I don’t think that’s the only problem.”  
  
How bad was John Watson’s problem, he reflected as he hauled a strung-out Sherlock from the cesspool in which he found him. Sherlock, having spent most of the next four hours puking his guts out, having apparently eschewed cocaine for heroin, had nothing whatsoever to say about it. At least not at that moment.  
  
Finally he seemed able to be away from the toilet or bin for a while. John got him changed and into bed. Handed him a mug of tea ( _All of it_ he said firmly when the younger man protested) and promised he’d get him some Tizer if he would just stay in bed for a bit.  
  
Sherlock had fallen into an uneasy sleep and John had stretched out on the bed next to him. After too many experiences for him to even admit, he had found that this was the best way to monitor the man, who could, even strung out, move as quietly as a shadow down the stairs and out. He had reluctantly called down to Mrs Hudson and with regret asked if she would mind going out for a few things. She did so with a sad look on her face, shaking her head over her dear boy. She brought back juice, biscuits, and some cans of soup. She put everything but one bottle of juice away. That she brought into the bedroom. John looked up from his book, which he had been staring at rather than reading while she had been gone.  
  
Thank you, he had mouthed.  
  
She looked down at the sleeping man, reaching out as if to lay her hand on his head, then pulled it back. She looked at John with a look of gratitude.  
  
Thank _you,_ she mouthed back before taking herself back downstairs.  
  
John eventually gave up on reading, having struggled through just a few pages. It wasn’t that the book wasn’t interesting. It was a fairly new one about Guy Burgess he had found on Sherlock’s chair. John just couldn’t concentrate. He kept going back to the events of the afternoon. How Sherlock had been fine when Lestrade had called him. Delighted in his own odd way when he discovered the key to the coded ransom note. Striding excitedly toward the ransom’s drop location. And then…  
  
When they had seen the car, they all realized simultaneously what that had probably meant. Sherlock, John, and Lestrade had all broken out into a run, Sherlock, as usual, in the lead. Before they even reached it, they could see that she wasn’t in the front or back seat of the roomy, luxurious vehicle.  
  
“She’s in the boot.” Sherlock’s voice had sounded suddenly strangled.  
  
The boot. Yes. It was when Sherlock had realized that that was where she was—it was then that things had gone off this time—not when they discovered that she was already dead, but as soon as Sherlock had figured out that she was in the boot. He had stopped, stock still, his head down, hands in fists at his sides, not moving any closer to the car. Lestrade had popped the boot and John had been busy checking the victim at that point, but a glance over his shoulder had told him that Sherlock had become pale and his jaw was clenched. It was then that the self-recrimination had begun.  
  
But why? What about the boot of the car had thrown him so far off? John racked his brain, trying to put together a better picture of what association the detective had made in his chaotic head.  
  
He glanced down at the man next to him. The taller man was asleep. He touched his cheek carefully. No fever. Good. This bout might not be so bad. He slid stealthily off the bed and padded out into the sitting room. Sherlock’s laptop was there, and it had been left logged on; no password needed. The smallest of smiles, rather bittersweet, ran over his lips as he thought about the irony. For all the hundreds of times Sherlock had used the doctor’s laptop without permission, deducing the passwords (John’s personal favorite—Fuck0ff$herlock—drawing a smile), now here he was using the detective’s.  
  
He brought up his blog and retrieved his entries. He began to read about the cases. Then he went into his email and looked at his sent messages. He had gotten into the habit of emailing Mary when he was worried about Sherlock, describing his symptoms and recording his many cases of nightmares and talking—shouting, sometimes—in his sleep. Mary rarely emailed a response back to these, but they would discuss them. She was worried sick about him. He didn’t think about the irony of that, either.  
  
He kept going back and forth, letting the electronic files refresh his memory of each horrible instance. He was looking at the dates. The case notes. The nightmare-driven rants.  
  
His dark eyes opened wide and his stomach dropped.  
  
There was a direct correlation. Of course there was. Why hadn’t he seen it before?  
  
The night he had stayed after rambling around in that not-quite-empty house. They had stuffed themselves on Chinese and even had some wine that evening, he recalled. It was the first time he could recall clearly hearing the detective talk in his sleep. It had been horrifying. Sherlock had said something about having a Chinese when he was supposed to have dinner with guests. And begging not to eat any more; that he was full and would be sick. And John remembered now how young Sherlock had sounded in his one-sided sleep-induced conversation.  
  
The next time had been the teen brothers, so very different in temperament and interests but with a shared loathing of their father, who had run off rather than face a holiday with him. That had set him to rambling about not changing someone’s plans, high and throwing his precious books all over the flat.  
  
That absolutely horrible case of the teen girl handcuffed, tortured, and left to die by her own father had been after that. That had been followed by the thin man heaving himself dry and shooting heroin.  
  
The man who had died of a heart attack brought on by the shock of discovering his unfaithful wife. The one found amidst a room full of broken dishes.  
  
Oh God. Yes. There it was. Sherlock’s sobbing and apologizing about a broken plate, and then about being cut. Deliberately. Begging for the cutting to stop.  
  
John had to stop and swallow hard as his stomach turned over. Then he kept going.  
  
An email to Mary that hadn’t correlated with a case. No. Not this time. But it still fit the pattern. This was when Sherlock had been defending himself against the accusation of getting a girl pregnant. That had been shortly after Mary had had the baby.  
  
And now this case? John felt the hair on the back of his neck prickle as the now-familiar sound of Sherlock lashing out in this sleep rolled down the hall. He slammed the laptop shut and ran to the bedroom.  
  
“No! Not the boot! No, please. I can’t breathe in there. No, Father! Please!”  
  
Boot? Yes. It fit. Oh, God. It fit.  
  
“No! I’m so hot. Please let me out. Let me out!” he shrieked.  
  
Oh God. Really?  
  
“My chest hurts. Please, Father. Please let me out,” he wept.  
  
“Sherlock,” John said firmly. “Wake up. Please wake up. You’re all right. You’re not in a car. You’re in your own bed in your own flat. Please wake up.”  
  
And then John wept as he held the dark curls and mopped the eerily pale brow. His best friend was self-destructing and he didn’t have a clue as to how to help him.  
  



	4. Advance and Withdrawal

John admitted that his brain was at least partially scrambled. He and Mary and the baby had accepted an invitation to the Holmes’ for dinner. And they had gone. Travel now consisted of changing bags and a portable cot in the boot of the car. He had been unable to obtain from the detective an affirmation or negative reaction to the invite.  
  
Sherlock had shown up two hours late, high as a kite.  
  
In a very, very odd way, it was easy.  
  
Dinner was a falsely cheery event. Got through that. Sent Mary and the baby home immediately after. Took a deep breath. By some miracle, Mycroft had not appeared—he had called his mother about some international emergency or other. Sherlock’s parents had been amazing, ignoring their son’s impairment. Not fussing or even objecting as he insulted the dinner, the house, the neighbourhood, and them. Now they were doing the washing up as John followed Sherlock out into the garden so he could have a cigarette. The fact that he didn’t even attempt to hide it from his mum made John frown at her, but she shook her head the tiniest bit, then gave him a slow nod of encouragement, echoed by one from Mr Holmes.  
  
Oh, they were not nearly as oblivious as they played. Not even close. He wandered out into the gathering dusk. The detective was standing in the middle of the garden, his head thrown back as he huffed out smoke. The dusk made it easier for John to see that the hand that held the glowing fag was shaking.  
  
“What?” the detective had eventually demanded, glaring at John.  
  
“Nothing,” John had replied. “Backgammon?”  
  
An hour later, holed up in the loo, John rubbed comforting circles on Sherlock’s back, wincing as he felt every vertebrae.  
  
They had gone back inside after his cigarette, and he had fallen asleep, sprawled out in a chair, while John and Mr Holmes had played a few quiet games of backgammon and Mrs Holmes had pretended to read a book while observing her younger son over the top of her reading glasses. About twenty minutes after he had dropped off, the shouting had started. Mrs Holmes had immediately tossed her book and glasses aside, rushing to her son’s chair and cradling his head as it whipped from side to side.  
  
“I’m sorry!” sobbed the younger man.  
  
“Oh, my boy. My sweet boy,” she murmured.  
  
“Should I call Mycroft?” Mr Holmes asked, looking anguished.  
  
“No. No. Mycroft means well but… well. John’s here. John’s better.”  
  
John didn’t need to ask what he was better at. Mycroft rubbed Sherlock up the wrong way when they were discussing something as innocuous as tailors; with Sherlock in the throes of coming down and tortured nightmares, his elder brother would have been salt on the wound.  
  
“No! No, please. I’m sorry. I just wanted to see what would happen… No… please, Father. No. Don’t. Don’t!” And he screamed. It was a horrible sound.  
  
John took a hold of his friend’s shoulders and began, as firmly and calmly as he could, talking to him.  
  
“Sherlock. Sherlock! Wake up. Wake up now. It’s a dream. It’s me, John. I’m here… your blogger is here…”  
  
Sherlock moaned and shuddered. He had stopped talking and seemed to be coming around.  
  
“That’s it, Sherlock,” Mr Holmes murmured. He was standing behind his wife, a comforting hand on her arm. “Your mummy and I are here, too. Wake up.”  
  
Sherlock woke up. His glasz eyes—those genetic marvels—popped all the way open and darted left and right, taking in his surroundings. First, the room. Then, his parents, on his left side. And finally John, who was crouched down in front of him, a comforting hand on his knee.  
  
“John,” he slurred.  
  
“I’m here, mate.”  
  
“Uh… sick…”  
  
John didn’t need to hear more, and he had the younger man up out of his chair and into the loo in three seconds—a record, he reflected later, and one he was grateful to make.  
  
*  
  
Sherlock had finally fallen back into a restless sleep. John sighed and patted his shoulder where he was, on the sofa in his parents’ sitting room. He had called Mary about the latest development.  
  
“How is he?” she had asked, not even saying hello. She had seen what was going on when John had rushed her and the baby out.  
  
“Vomiting. Stomach pain. Fever.”  
  
“Does he need to go to A & E?” He could hear the tension in her voice.  
  
“No. He didn’t O.D. He’s just coming down. Hard.”  
  
Sherlock had moaned at that point, and his mother had bent over him, wiping his face with a wet flannel.  
  
Mr Holmes straightened up from where he was carefully placing Sherlock’s shoes by the fireplace. He had already hung his son’s suit jacket up, brushing imaginary lint from the shoulders and straightening the lapels with long, delicate fingers. Sherlock’s fingers.  
  
“Do you need a bin, my love?” Mrs Holmes asked her son in a soft murmur.  
  
“No. Water?”  
  
Without a word, Mr Holmes went toward the kitchen and John could hear him getting a cup out of a cabinet. The tap running. He came back and handed the cup to his wife. He looked so old; older than he had looked when they had arrived for dinner, John thought.  
  
“That’s not usual for cocaine—the vomiting. What did he take this time?”  
  
His wife’s voice jolted John. He had forgotten he was on the phone with her. “He wouldn’t tell me, but based on his symptoms, I suspect heroin yesterday and coke today, when he started going through withdrawal.”  
  
“Sounds like it. You stay with him. He needs you.” Her voice was even; firm.  
  
“I thought…” He stopped. He hadn’t actually thought. He furrowed his brow in anguish.  
  
“We’re fine, John. Take care of Sherlock.” And she had rung off.  
  
So that is what John Watson, MD, did.  
  
“Do you have anything he could take for the nausea and fever?” he asked. Mrs Holmes nodded, but it was Mr Holmes who went out of the room without a word, returning in a few minutes with two bottles. He twisted the top off one and shook two tablets of paracetamol into his palm. He bent over the sofa.  
  
“Come on, Sherlock. Sit up for a moment. John wants you to take these.”  
  
Sherlock sat up slowly, not opening his eyes. He wiped his cheeks with shaking hands; his eyes were watering.  
  
“Open up.” He popped the tablets into Sherlock’s mouth, then held his hand out toward his wife, seeking without asking for the cup of water.  
  
John frowned. That gesture. So familiar.  
  
And now that graceful hand was holding the cup up to Sherlock’s lips, tipping it carefully so the man could sip. “Easy. Not too much,” he murmured. He put the cup down and opened the second bottle, pouring some of the thick liquid into the small plastic cup that came with it. Held that up. Got Sherlock to swallow. “This will make your tum easier, my boy. Now, a bit more water…” He held that cup up to his lips again. Sherlock drank, then groaned. “All right. That’s enough for now. I’m going to go out and get you some of that drink you like. You have a sleep and when you wake up, you can have some of that. All right?”  
  
Sherlock nodded and slid back down, burying his face in the worn cushion.  
  
Mr Holmes straightened up, kissed his wife’s forehead, and strode out of the room.  
  
“Mrs Holmes, can we talk?” John said quietly.  
  
“I suppose we better. And it’s Violet. I think we’re a bit beyond all that Mr and Mrs nonsense.”  
  
John nodded and followed her into the kitchen, where she switched on the kettle. They made tea in silence, then sat heavily at the kitchen table. John took a sip. Two. Swallowed. Sighed. Looked into the older woman’s eyes; the eyes—almond-shaped, just like his friend’s.  
  
“You have questions,” she stated. “About Sherlock’s father.”  
  
“Yeah.”  
  
“About why he has nightmares about him.”  
  
“Yes.”  
  
“But when he’s with him, he’s fine.”  
  
“That. Yes.”  
  
She sighed and took a mouthful of her tea. She put the mug down and began to fidget with it. “It’s because the man you know as Sherlock’s dad, while he is actually his father—biologically, I mean—was not the man who raised him.”  
  
John sat back and folded his arms across his chest. “Tell me.”  
  
And so with one ear open to any sounds of distress from Sherlock in the next room, John sat in a straight-backed kitchen chair in the cozy kitchen of an even cozier cottage and listened to a horror story.  
  
“I was teaching mathematics at the university when I met him. Stafford Holmes. He was lovely. Very tall. Large. He could have been portly if he didn’t watch what he ate. He dressed beautifully. Elegantly. He _was_ elegant. He was a music professor. Adored the classics. Very public school. Very posh.”  
  
John observed her. She seemed to be seeing the man as she described him.  
  
“I was quite swept off my feet when he began to pay attention to me.”  
  
John leaned forward, peering intently at her. Something was jarring. Something was off.  
  
“He played all the instruments, you know. And he’d take me to operas and concerts. Bought me clothing—outfits to wear to the theatre.”  
  
There was a disconnect.  
  
“Or out to French restaurants, and he’d order these ridiculously expensive bottles of wine.”  
  
Her voice. Her voice didn’t match the words that were coming out of her mouth.  
  
“He had family money, you see, and I was just a poorly-paid mathematics professor from a completely middle-class family. So he set out to educate me. Make me fine.”  
  
The words were complimentary. She was saying positive things.  
  
“Make me into someone he wouldn’t be embarrassed to marry.”  
  
She hated him.  
  
“And it worked. We did marry. And I had Mycroft just two years later. And that was when things started to change.”  
  
Her voice trembled. John gently laid his hand on hers where it was now splayed flat on the table. “Was he jealous?” he ventured, clearing his throat.  
  
“Yes. Here he had gotten me up to snuff—taught me how to dress and talk and pronounce things the way he wanted—and now I was a mummy with nappies to change and bottles to sterilize. No more going to the opera or the museum. He was horribly jealous of the baby and embarrassed by me.”  
  
“Did he… did he take it out on you?”  
  
She shook her head. “No. Nor on Mycroft. In fact, it might seem contradictory, but it made him actually quite attentive toward him. Possessive, really, now that I think about it. It was as if he had given up on me and put all that energy into raising the perfect little gentleman.”  
  
John nodded. That was Mycroft.  
  
“They grew very close. Mycroft even looked like Stafford, you see—didn’t take after me at all in that way. He had inherited my brains, but his father’s looks and taste. Opera. Can you imagine, a four-year-old boy requesting that I play _Aida_ for him on his little nursery record player?”  
  
John bit his lip.  
  
“So very close, you see, that eventually there wasn’t a bit of room left for me.”  
  
Ah.  
  
Her husband returned. John heard him come into the house, walking quietly through the sitting room. His footsteps paused as he checked on his son, then started again. He came into the kitchen. Violet smiled weakly at him as he put a few bottles of Tizer into the fridge.  
  
“Water hot?” he asked, straightening up. He switched the kettle on before she could reply and made himself some tea. Sat down at the table with them. Patted his wife’s hand. “Explaining things to John?”  
  
“Yes.”  
  
“All right then.”  
  
“I was just getting up to you,” she supplied. Ah. John looked from one to the other of them expectantly. “We got to know each other at a family gathering,” she explained.  
  
A family—oh!  
  
“Yes, I’m Stafford’s cousin,” the gentle man murmured.  
  
“So you’re both Holmeses?” John asked, wanting to be clear.  
  
He nodded. “Our fathers were brothers.”  
  
“Mycroft was five,” Sherlock’s mother continued. “I was home-schooling him. We had tried kindergarten with him, but it was a bit of a disaster. He didn’t get along with the other children, you see.”  
  
Yes, John could see that.  
  
“And of course… well, we had _met_ before, at the wedding and few other family functions, but we had a weekend party at the family estate—I mean, where we were living then. Where Mycroft lives now. All of Stafford’s family. I felt terribly out of place. Stafford kept taking Mycroft off—there was a music recital—although Paul played piano for that—but there was riding, and shooting, and cricket, and croquet, and all that nonsense. I was left behind.”  
  
“As was I,” the older man interjected. “My own upbringing hadn’t been quite so… _so_. Bit of a family fall-out before I was born, you see, and my father being the younger of the sons got somewhat the short end of the stick. I was still family, but no public school for me.”  
  
Things were starting to fall into place in John’s head.  
  
“And so we got left behind together. And—well—to be blunt, we fell in love.”  
  
“I was mad for her. Still am,” her husband grinned. John smiled back. That much he knew.  
  
“But of course I was married, and damn me if I wasn’t such a weakling back then. I didn’t know what to do. I didn’t know how to do it, rather,” she corrected herself. “I look back now and could just kick myself. Why didn’t I just leave Stafford? Well, I couldn’t. There was still My to consider.” She took a deep breath. “And so I stayed. I stayed married to a man who didn’t love me anymore; I don’t think he ever really did. He liked to _have_ me. To possess me. To dress me up and show me off. And then when I provided him with a son who could fill that role, well. That was that.”  
  
“It wasn’t just you. I never stood up to him, either,” Mr Holmes said sadly. “Didn’t want to rock the boat. He had a terrible temper. But we saw each other behind his back. We were quite madly in love.”  
  
Oh! The last piece fitted in. “And then you got pregnant,” John blurted out. Mrs Holmes nodded. “And your husband knew it wasn’t his child.” She nodded again.  
  
“Stafford knew about us all along, apparently,” Mr Holmes explained. “He just didn’t care. He had ceased to even think about Violet; all his attention was on Mycroft.”  
  
“It was not even remotely possible that he was Sherlock’s biological father,” she added. “But, of course, he never admitted that. There were appearances to be maintained. Mycroft was seven when Sherlock was born.”  
  
As if responding to his name, Sherlock began to moan and thrash on the sofa in the next room. Mr Holmes rose quickly. “I’ll go,” he stated quietly before he headed out of the kitchen.  
  
John and Mrs Holmes listened to the two voices, so similar. Sherlock’s, raspy with sleep and illness, sounded weak, but his dad’s was strong and soothing and gentle. The older man came back into the kitchen and went to the fridge, taking out one of the bottles of the sweet, red beverage he had purchased.  
  
“He wants a bit of his drink,” he explained. He smiled sadly and took the bottle with him.  
  
“He always did like that,” his mother murmured. “Sweeties and juice and biscuits and pasta. It was all I could do to get him to eat a veg. Not even meat, really.”  
  
“Some things haven’t changed,” John agreed.  
  
“He was so different from Mycroft. My was just such a perfect little boy. Well-behaved. Polite. A little gentleman. And Sherlock was… well, I suppose now he’d be diagnosed with that attention deficit hyperactive disorder.” She smiled.  
  
“A bit manic, was he?”  
  
“Oh, you would not believe the half of it,” she stated drolly. “Swinging on the drapes and blowing things up and—oh! What was funny was that, in his own way, Mycroft encouraged him. He’d read him these pirate stories—get him all wound up—then laugh when ‘lock would go dashing through the manor, waving his little sword. Come to think of it, My got him that sword. And the hat. And his first chemistry set. And the first set of replacement drapes.”  
  
“So they got along when they were younger?”  
  
“In a way. Not really brotherly, mind you. There was the age difference. And the personality difference. And of course Stafford’s very different treatment of them. But My was very… protective of his little brother.”  
  
“Did he know that… did he know who Sherlock’s father was?”  
  
“Oh, yes. He figured it out on his own as soon as ‘lock was born. I let him hold his brother for the first time—still in hospital—and he just looked at him, and touched his little hand, and—I remember this as if it was yesterday—he said, “Mummy, Father isn’t going to like my baby brother much, is he?”  
  
“God.”  
  
“And that turned out to be an understatement, I’m afraid.”  
  
“John!” Mr Holmes called. “You’re needed.”  
  
“Coming!” John jumped up from the table, leaving Violet to sit by herself, staring down into her now-cold tea.  
  



	5. Covering

“Sherlock, come on. Let me take your temperature. I have to see how high your fever is.”  
  
“I’m fine,” the younger man said, pouting.  
  
“You’re not fine. You’re burning up.”  
  
“You’re not putting anything in my mouth.” Sherlock clamped his mouth shut.  
  
“Your parents have one of the new thermometers. You don’t even have to open your mouth. Look.” He held up the instrument encouragingly. “Just hold still for two seconds.”  
  
Sherlock reluctantly did as he was told, shaking his head impatiently as soon as he heard the electronic chirp from the instrument in his ear.  
  
“Thirty-eight point eight. Not good,” John commented, clearing the thermometer that Mr Holmes had produced for him. “Have some more juice.”  
  
“Makes my stomach hurt,” Sherlock complained.  
  
“I know, but you can take more of the liquid med for that. You’re dehydrated and it’s only going to get worse when…”  
  
Sherlock suddenly sprinted toward the loo.  
  
“… oh, good. The cramps and runs have started,” he muttered into the air.  
  
It was going to be a long night.  
  
It was.  
  
He had called Mary a while later. She was fine; the baby was fine—both were tucked into bed. “I’ve been trying to read, but I’ve been so worried,” she said.  
  
“He’s really quite ill this time. We’re at the other end of needing the loo every fifteen minutes now.” He could imagine her face, her nose wrinkled up in disgust. “And his temp keeps going up.”  
  
“Are you managing all right?”  
  
“Yeah. Not much we can do except treat the symptoms and monitor him. I’m going to try to get some more water or juice into him.”  
  
“Poor Sherlock,” she sighed. “What’s gotten into him lately? I mean, the cocaine is bad enough, but this?”  
  
“Well, I think I’m finding out about that now. Look, he’s coming out. I’ve got to go. Kiss my baby girl for me, and I’ll call in the morning. Yeah?”  
  
“I love you, John Watson,” she stated.  
  
“And I love you, Mary Watson,” he replied before hitting “end call.”  
  
Sherlock stumbled back to the sofa. He was deathly pale and sweating. John checked his pulse, then took his temperature. This time, the detective didn’t even seem to notice. The doctor frowned at the digital display. “How about a bath?” he suggested casually. “You can’t be very comfortable.”  
  
“Mmm.”  
  
God, he must feel like absolute shit, John realized, to agree to a bath that readily.  
  
“I’ll go run it,” Mr Holmes offered. “Tepid, yes?”  
  
“Yeah. Ta.” So the elder Holmes had picked up on his reaction to Sherlock’s temperature reading.  
  
“What is it?” Violet appeared at the doorway.  
  
“His fever’s gotten a bit too high for my liking. And he’s a mess. A nice, cool bath should help.” John spoke calmly, looking her in the eye.  
  
“I’ll make up a bed for him upstairs,” she replied, sensibly.  
  
“That would be good.”  
  
It was a testament to how ill Sherlock was that he didn’t throw a strop about the fact that his father and his best friend were essentially man-handling him into a bathtub. They had gently but unceremoniously stripped him after guiding him up the narrow stairs and into the bathroom. His mother had followed, whisking away his elegant clothing, now sodden with sweat and filthy with various bodily fluids. She had then briskly made up a bed in their spare room and put a pair of Mr Holmes’ pyjamas on it.  
  
Sherlock lay back in the enormous, old tub and sighed, his eyes shut.  
  
“That feel better?” his father asked, handing John a flannel.  
  
“Mmm. Nice,” he grunted.  
  
“This should help with the fever. Let’s get you cleaned up,” John stated, kneeling and wetting the flannel. “Then some juice and into bed, all right?”  
  
The bath did help. John was grateful. He had wiped his friend down in a matter-of-fact way, talking nonsense about the baby and Mary while he did so, trying to distract him. In thirty minutes he had him back out, dried off, and dressed in the pyjamas. Mrs Holmes came in with a cup of water and a bottle of juice.  
  
“Thank you,” he said to her. “Sherlock. Here. Do you want some juice?” The thin man nodded and John patiently held the bottle to his lips, letting him take a few small sips. “Lie back, now,” he instructed. Sherlock didn’t do that so much as fall back, his now damp curls spread out on the pillow.  
  
“I don’t want to give him more right now. When his stomach is less tetchy he can manage some. You should probably go to bed,” he added, noticing how tired she looked.  
  
She nodded. “You’ll watch him?” she asked, unnecessarily.  
  
“Yeah. I’ll just stretch out next to him. Won’t be the first time,” he added shyly. “I think he’ll sleep properly now.”  
  
“Thank you, John.”  
  
She smiled, but her eyes were sad.  
  
It was a long night. John, with his training, had been able to drop off to sleep every time Sherlock did, but he also immediately awakened every time his friend did, which was often. Sherlock was having horrible cramps and needed to be in the bathroom nearly every hour. He would stagger back to the bedroom and fall back onto the mattress, pushing John’s steadying hands off weakly but impatiently. John would get him to take some more of the thick liquid that should have been helping and drink some water, and they would both fall asleep again. Until the next time.  
  
And toward morning his fever went up again. John woke and frowned, listening. Sherlock was awake, sitting up but hunched over, curled up. He was hallucinating, whispering. “I’m in your room, My. I was so stupid. I dropped a glass at dinner.” There was a pause. “No, it _is_ my fault. I was clumsy and stupid.” Another pause. “He… I had to clean up the glass.” Pause. John had realized that Sherlock was apparently having a conversation with his brother; a secretive one, by the sound of it. “I… he… it doesn’t hurt that much. It doesn’t hurt that much when the glass is so sharp. Can you come home this weekend? Please? Oh, God. He’s found me. I’ve got to go. Please come home.” He jerked his head up suddenly, his eyes wide with terror. “No. Please don’t! No!” he shrieked.  
  
John heard a sob from the doorway. Mrs Holmes stood there in her nightgown, her hand pressed to her mouth. Mr Holmes came up behind her, took her gently by the shoulders, and turned her away to press her face into his chest. He wrapped his long arms around her and pressed his cheek to the top of her head. “Shh, my love. Shush. Come along.”  
  
Sherlock crouched on the bed in terror. He was shaking and holding his arms up protectively over his head. “No! No! No! Not again. Please not again! Please, Father!”  
  
“Oh, God, Sherlock. Sit tight. It’s all right. I’ll be right back,” John shouted as he sprinted down the short hall and into the bathroom. Tore open the medicine cabinet. Looked under the sink. Thank God. They had what he needed. He filled the basin he had found with tepid water and rubbing alcohol, grabbed a few flannels and towels, and ran back to the bedroom. Sherlock was whimpering and holding his left forearm tightly.  
  
“Sherlock.” John spoke calmly but firmly. “Look at me. You are hallucinating. Your… father isn’t here right now. He’s not going to hurt you. No one is going to hurt you.”  
  
Sherlock paused. He took a deep breath. “John?” he rasped out.  
  
“Yeah. John. I’m going to give you an alcohol rub. Here.” He reached to help Sherlock take his top off. The man flinched. “Sorry. Take off your shirt,” he instructed. Sherlock was shaking so much that he couldn’t manage it, but he did try. John finally got it off him, then sat on the bed behind him.  
  
“I’m going to start with your neck and back, then your wrists. Okay?”  
  
“Puh…”  
  
“What?”  
  
“Pulse points,” Sherlock pushed out.  
  
“Yup. That’s right. Neck and wrists. It’s going to feel miserably cold, but it’s what you need to cool down.”  
  
“Cool down?” Sherlock sounded unusually confused now.  
  
“Yes. You’ve got a very high fever and you were hallucinating. But it’s all right. I’m going to cool you down. All right?”  
  
Sherlock nodded. He flinched as the flannel, wet with water and rubbing alcohol, touched his burning skin, but he sat as still as he could. John’s hands were firm but gentle. He talked to Sherlock now; telling him about the book Mary was reading and trying to get him to deduce what it was. He didn’t try, but the sound of John’s voice seemed to calm him a great deal.  
  
“Here, take these,” John finally instructed. He didn’t know when the bottle of paracetamol has appeared on the night stand, but he knew it was time for another dose. Sherlock took the tablets without a murmur and a good long drink of water besides. “Good job. There, now lie down,” John said. “Does that feel better?”  
  
Sherlock sighed, his eyes shut. “Yes.”  
  
“Good. Your fever should come down now. Try to sleep some more. All right?”  
  
“Mmm.”  
  
John sighed and stretched out next to him, his eyes closing of their own accord. He felt himself drifting off.  
  
“John?”  
  
“Yeah, mate?”  
  
“Thank you.”  
  
“All right. Sleep now.”  
  
And they both did.  
  
*  
  
John woke a few hours later, puzzled for a second. Why was he sleeping on that side of the bed? Usually Mary did… oh. Right. He gingerly opened his eyes. Pale light was streaming in through the window. He was on his side on top of the duvet, his arm draped over Sherlock’s waist. Sherlock still had no shirt on, and John stared at the man’s back. He could see every bone.  
  
He sat up carefully, leaning over his patient. Sherlock was sound asleep. He was still deathly pale. John reached for the thermometer on the night stand, hoping the sound of it wouldn’t wake him. He took a quick reading. 37.8. Much better. Good.  
  
He eased himself off the bed and nipped into the bathroom. After using the toilet, he gave his face a quick wipe and padded downstairs. He could smell coffee.  
  
Mrs Holmes was alone in the kitchen, standing at the cooker. “Good morning, John,” she said quietly.  
  
“Good morning. That smells wonderful.” He sat down and allowed her to bring him a cup of coffee.  
  
“I’m making Eggs Benedict,” she replied. “I find cooking… helps.”  
  
“That sounds amazing,” he admitted. Ten minutes later, he was digging in. He felt a bit guilty enjoying the meal when he knew that Sherlock was unlikely to be able to stomach anything but toast, but he needed the sustenance after the rigors of the night and the fact that it was, quite frankly, delicious—well, it just was.  
  
“Dad just popped out for a few things,” she explained, joining him at the table. She ate, not as heartily as John, but her colour seemed better than the night before.  
  
“Can we talk a bit more?” John finally ventured as he cleared his plate.  
  
“Of course.” She put down her fork.  
  
John cleared his throat, looking down at his empty plate. This was not going to be easy.  
  
“I suppose you want to know why I let it happen. Why I did nothing to stop it.” Her voice was gentle and sad.  
  
John nodded, unable to speak.  
  
“Well, I did try. Of course I did. But it wasn’t enough. Stafford was… cruel. And strong. And clever about things that I just didn’t even know existed. Domestic things. _Legal_ things.” She stopped. Her chin was quivering. She took a deep breath and calmed herself. “The abuse didn’t start right away. The physical abuse, I mean. Stafford either ignored Sherlock or shouted at him for the first four years of his life. And that was all right. I mean, not bad. Mycroft played dad, a bit, and Paul did, too—whenever he could see him.”  
  
John sat very still and listened.  
  
“It was when My went away to school that…” her voice broke and her lovely eyes filled with tears.  
  
“That what?” John prodded. He couldn’t help himself.  
  
“When Mycroft was out of the house, Stafford very promptly divorced me on the basis of me being unfaithful to him—which of course I was—but he also got sole custody of Sherlock.”  
  
John’s mouth fell open at the realization of what she was saying hit him.  
  
“So he… so Sherlock was… _alone_ with him?”  
  
“Yes. I was banned from seeing him at first. I was allowed phone calls and some planned visits, but that was all. And I regret to this day not fighting it. I was an awful mother. I should have…” And the beautiful, intelligent woman sitting in front of John wept.  
  
And John—John the comforter, John the healer—didn’t move. Didn’t utter a sound. Because at that moment, he wanted her to cry—not for herself, but for his friend. Yes, she should have. And he wanted her to suffer from her guilt.  
  
And then he collected himself. That wasn’t helping, either, he thought. Being angry at her wasn’t going to change what had happened. He reached out one steady hand and picked up his coffee. Took a sip. Put it down firmly.  
  
“You didn’t know how bad it was, did you?”  
  
“Back then, no, I didn’t. I suppose that’s part of the reason I didn’t do enough—it’s still no excuse. I should have known. My own son! But I never saw him except at music programs and visits to museums. Always in public places. Always dressed perfectly—jumpers with long sleeves, you know? And trousers and scarves. At first. Later, Stafford was more careful not to mark him where it might show. And of course Sherlock never breathed a word. Still, I should have known that a man like Stafford… that he…” She stopped.  
  
“Sherlock excels at covering up his problems,” John blurted out, suddenly feeling nothing but compassion for her. Because hadn’t he been through exactly the same thing with the man? It was only when he was completely at a loss, ripped apart by nightmares that John just happened to be present for, that John had realized the depths of his friend’s issues. “Did Mycroft know?” he asked gently.  
  
“He knew more than I did, but he didn’t know what to do about it. His father had, of course, seen to that—said that if he told anyone, especially me, Sherlock would be the one to suffer.”  
  
“My God,” John murmured, shaking his head.  
  
She stood up suddenly, taking their plates to the sink. She took a moment to gather herself, then turned around and faced him.  
  
“Stafford sent him to a local public school rather than away so he could keep… keep control over him. There was no escape for him. He was brilliant, of course, but constantly in trouble.”  
  
“I can imagine,” John said drily, and she smiled the tiniest bit.  
  
“I felt awful for his instructors, really. No friends, of course. No sport. No normal school interests of any sort. The only thing he really had was his violin and science instruction. He was really quite brilliant at most of that—chemistry and biology in particular—and maths. And languages. Well, everything, really, except history. He only liked to learn about… well, beheadings and poisonings and the like. You can imagine. (John couldn’t help grinning at that—he could.) The class work came so easily to him. He was so bored. Paul got him a microscope for here.”  
  
“For his visits?” John asked.  
  
“Would you like more coffee?” she asked. He nodded and she refilled his cup before answering. “Yes. Things changed a bit as Sherlock got older, you see. I think that Stafford began having trouble keeping him under his control. He began to allow him to come visit us much more often. He’d stay here at weekends and school holidays.”  
  
“That must have been nice,” John commented.  
  
“It was lovely. He was quite a different person when he was here. Oh, he was still Sherlock, and stubborn enough to drive any parent mad, but he would actually open up a bit. Talk about his experiments and classes and music. Eat enormous amounts. Play games—what’s that one with the body parts? It buzzes. Anyway… he could be so sweet. Actually laugh. And then… well, Stafford used to send a car for him, and it was like watching the tide come in.”  
  
“What do you mean?”  
  
“As the time approached for him to be picked up, he would start to… withdraw. He would stop talking; lock himself in the bathroom. Sometimes he’d shout. Pace. Throw things. One time he turned over the entire kitchen table.” She suddenly bit her lips, her eyes shining. John waited. She finally took a deep breath and sighed. “He started smoking when he was thirteen. The drugs, when he was fifteen.” She watched John as he let this sink in. “Ironically, in the end, that’s what actually saved him.”  
  
“How?”  
  
“Stafford clearly couldn’t control him any longer. He’d sneak out at night. Show up to classes high. Constant calls from the headmaster—hospital—police. It embarrassed him. Sherlock was ruining his reputation. And so he sent him off to university. Granted, that didn’t go so smoothly,” she paused, reflecting on the enormous understatement that she had just made, “but it wasn’t Stafford’s problem any longer.”  
  
“Sherlock knew who was who, right? I mean, that Stafford was not his biological father.”  
  
“Oh, yes. It wasn’t that anyone told him, mind you. He figured it out very early on, the way Mycroft had.”  
  
John fell silent for a moment, digesting it all, as Mrs Holmes began to cook more eggs. Her husband would be back from the shops soon.  
  
Her back to John, she commented, “I’ve washed Sherlock’s shirt and cleaned his suit up the best I could for now.”  
  
“Thank you. I should be able to get him back home today. I think the worst is over. But speaking of, I should go check on…”  
  
“I’ll go.” Mr Holmes had entered so quietly that John jumped. The older man put a few bags on the kitchen counter and headed up the stairs.  
  
“He really loves Sherlock,” John commented to himself.  
  
“Sherlock always liked to see him. When he’d visit, Dad would do all the things a father is supposed to do with a boy. Taught him to play chess—of course Sherlock won every single time, but still—and helped him make models of molecules and listen to him go on about his chemistry classes… he was just every bit the loving dad whenever he was allowed to be.” She smiled, a distant look in her eyes.  
  
John smiled back. “You’re remembering something lovely,” he noted.  
  
She nodded. “He had a little ‘talk’ with Sherlock when he was about thirteen—you know, about _biology_. We knew about him, of course, but Paul wanted to make sure that Sherlock understood that however he felt was fine with us. Stafford was not so… accepting, you see.”  
  
John felt himself blushing. Hold your best mate’s head and stroke his hair and rub his back when he was being sick? Of course. Strip him down and bathe him when he was too ill to do it himself? Sure. Tuck up behind him in the same bed when he was wracked with nightmares? Why not? Talk to Sherlock about his sexual preferences ever again? After that rather epic fail at Angelo’s? No. Just… no.  
  
Violet looked at him closely. “Oh, John, dear! Of _course_ we know. And it’s fine. It’s all fine.”  
  
And John Watson found himself falling quite a bit in love with Mr and Mrs Holmes.  
  
*  
  
Paul Holmes paused at the door to the kitchen, listening to his wife. He remembered vividly the story she was relating to John. She was paraphrasing quite a bit, of course—  
  
 _“What do you have going there, Sherlock?”  
  
“Experiment.”  
  
“What’s it about?”  
  
“Inter—interaction between common household cleaners and substances often found at crime scenes,” the thin, dark-haired boy had told him solemnly, peering intently into his microscope.  
  
Paul had seated himself next to his son. “Explain it to me,” he had suggested, tipping his head toward the slides.  
  
“This one is… these four slides are clotted cream.”  
  
“Clotted cream is often found at crime scenes?” Paul had teased, receiving a wry look in return. They had had quite a nice cream tea, so he knew where Sherlock had gotten his samples.   
  
“It might be. And I’ve treated each of them with… something different.”  
  
“Such as?” Paul sat back and looked at his son, bent diligently over the kitchen table.  
  
“Bleach. Furniture polish. Hydrogen peroxide. And bathroom cleaner.”  
  
“Oh, I see. You’re attempting to replicate someone’s efforts at cleaning up different… messes.”  
  
Sherlock had beamed at his dad—a genuine, warm smile that made his usually solemn face light up. “Yeah!” he exclaimed. “Like when there’s a murder, and someone tries to clean it up– I want to see what’s left—the residue. I’ve got slides with blood and sweat and shepherd’s pie and…” And then he had faltered.  
  
“And?” Paul had encouraged.  
  
“And… sometimes there’re substances at crime scenes that are…” Sherlock had lowered his gaze to the microscope. Paul could see the blush forming on his usually pale cheeks.  
  
“Not so nice?” he offered. “It’s all right. I’m sure there’re all sorts of things at crime scenes that I don’t know about. Bone bits and… brain bits.” Sherlock looked at his dad with admiration. “It… it isn’t brains, is it?” Paul asked. Sherlock hung his head again. The blush was more vivid than before. “So it’s not brain bits right now, is it,” he intuited. His son nodded the smallest bit. “Well, I might be a bit relieved, as I’m not sure where you would get those to experiment on. But…” he paused. Sherlock had shrunk down into his chair, reminding Paul vividly that despite his blazing intelligence and unworldly knowledge, he was still only thirteen. “You’ve done a nice job preparing the slides,” he commented. Sherlock didn’t respond, looking determinedly into the microscope, his long, thin fingers focusing it delicately.  
  
Paul waited. He watched intently as his son stared into the microscope’s eyepiece, then made some notes in his spidery hand, so atypical for a teenage schoolboy, in a blue notebook. He waited as the young man carefully switched slides and made more notes. Slides three and four and clotted cream was done.  
  
Sherlock’s pale hand slid out and reached for a fresh slide.  
  
“I believe I know what fluid,” Paul commented, quietly.  
  
Sherlock froze.  
  
Paul wanted to hug him, or at least pat him on the shoulder, but he knew better. Sherlock did not deal well with being touched. Stick with facts, he told himself. “Sherlock, it’s all right. I do watch those programmes,” he murmured instead. “And I do know what other sorts of fluids are found at crime scenes. And it’s… not a bad thing.” He avoided saying “perfectly natural” mainly because it was the first thing that came to him, and he knew that if that was the case, Sherlock would huff and roll his eyes at his embarrassingly mundane dad.  
  
“I…” Sherlock finally choked out. And stopped.  
  
“You are thirteen and I was thirteen once, whether or not you believe it, and I do remember some things.” Paul’s tone was light and loving. Sherlock despised being condescended to, so he was striving for a somewhat more mature tone. “Sherlock, I get it, you know.”  
  
“I know,” his son echoed quietly.  
  
“And it’s fine.”  
  
Sherlock scrawled notes on two more slides, getting a bit excited about the reaction of furniture polish on blood.  
  
“Other things are fine, too,” Paul finally offered.  
  
“What… what’s fine?” Sherlock grunted, disappointed with the bathroom cleaner and blood mixture.  
  
Paul took a deep breath. “Well, we don’t have to worry about you getting anyone pregnant, do we?” he breathed—delicately, carefully—as if dusting off an object of great antiquity.  
  
Sherlock closed his eyes for a second. He took a deep breath.  
  
Paul waited.  
  
“No.” There. He had said it. His amazing, brilliant, unique son had admitted what he and his wife (all credit to her, really) had figured out at least a year earlier. And it was fine. All he wanted was for his son to be happy. Or at least content. Or at the very least not tortured. He wished there was a guarantee for that.  
  
“All right, then. It’s fine with me, and it’s fine with your mum. It’s all fine. Now, tell me what happens when you apply furniture polish to blood.” _  
  
*  
  
Paul Holmes peeked into the kitchen, then entered and seated himself at the table. “He’s still asleep,” he reported, then beamed appreciatively as his wife put a full plate in front of him. “Ah, my dear! How lovely.” He tucked in.  
  
“I’ll do Sherlock some toast when he wakes up,” she replied.  
  
“I should try to get him home at some point,” John sighed. _And then what?_ He had no idea.  
  
“I think this time you do need to talk to him,” Mrs Holmes said. Could she read minds? Is she where Sherlock got his powers of observation?  
  
“Yeah. I do. Not really sure how that will go, but I can’t leave him like this, now, can I?”  
  
“You’re a very good man, John Watson,” Mr Holmes murmured.  
  
“I might have to be a Bit Not Good this time,” John replied bitterly.  
  
They all sat in silence for a bit. Mr Holmes finished his breakfast and his wife began the washing up. He joined her. John sat at the table, swirling the last bit of his coffee in his mug, a look of infinite sadness darkening his usually bright face.   
  
Mrs Holmes handed the last dish to her husband to wipe and put away. She dried her hands and sat back down at the table. “Would you like more coffee?” she asked hesitantly.  
  
“Hmm? Oh, no. No thank you. He looked up from his now-empty mug. Violet’s eyes locked on his.  
  
“I’m sorry about this,” she said, her voice breaking.  
  
“About what?”  
  
“About… we can’t help, really, can we?”  
  
John waited, not sure of how to respond. Mr Holmes put away the last dish and turned around. “What Mum means is that he’s not going accept help from us, is he?” he explained.  
  
John turned and looked up at the thin man with the elegant hands.   
  
“We can’t really be part of the solution when we’re part of the problem,” Mrs Holmes finally whispered. She let her face drop into her hands.  
  
And for her sake, and for the sake of Mr Holmes, and especially for Sherlock’s, John wished and wished that she wasn’t right. But he knew in his heart that she was.  
  
So finally, firmly, he put the mug down and rose decisively. He squared his shoulders and turned sharply toward the door.  
  
“Well, no time like the present,” he ground out.  
  
He headed up the stairs.  
  
*  
  
Sherlock’s eyes opened slowly when John entered the bedroom. He was curled up on his side, facing the door. He squinted at the light, then screwed his eyes shut tightly and groaned.  
  
“I guess I don’t have to ask how you’re feeling,” John commented drily.  
  
“Empty,” Sherlock rasped out.  
  
“Your mum is organizing toast, and you’re going to have as much water and juice as you can handle.”  
  
“Mmph.”  
  
“And then we’re going to get you dressed, and I’m going to get you home, and then we are going to have a very long talk.”  
  
“No.” Sherlock rolled onto his stomach, burying his face in the pillow.  
  
“No to what?” John commented.  
  
Sherlock didn’t reply.  
  
“No to toast? Juice? Going home? Getting out of bed?” John pushed.  
  
“No to… I don’t know.”  
  
John sighed and sat on the bed. He automatically began rubbing Sherlock’s back, between his sharp shoulder blades. “Well, if you don’t know what you’re protesting against, then you can hardly put up a good argument,” he said, logically. He felt oddly calm. Part of it was that he could tell that Sherlock’s temperature was down. The other part he wasn’t really sure about. Exhaustion, perhaps. Or inevitability. He thought about when Mary was pregnant. She had worried and fretted over labour—how painful it would be. How she would deal with it. How long it would last. If there would be complications. It had gotten a bit worrisome a few times—she seemed nearly ready to have an anxiety attack. And then when it started, she realized that no matter how she dealt with it, she had no choice but to go through it, and had sailed through in a manner that was, to be frank, admirable.  
  
“Why are you being so nice to me?” Sherlock mumbled into the pillow.  
  
“Because I’m your friend,” John replied reasonably.  
  
“Why are you my friend?” For the first time in nearly a day, Sherlock sounded more like himself.  
  
“I often ask myself that very question,” John admitted, chuckling. He couldn’t help it. It was all a bit ludicrous, he realized. “But I am, and I always will be, and I am afraid that in that role as friend, I’m going to have to do something you won’t like.”  
  
Sherlock turned his head on the pillow sharply. One pale eye glared at the doctor. “What?” he demanded.  
  
John immediately wiped the smile from his face and resumed rubbing Sherlock’s back. “No, no. It’s all right. It’s just… we have to have a talk, don’t we?”  
  
“No.” Sherlock shut his eyes again and turned back toward the pillow.  
  
“No to talking, is it?”  
  
Sherlock nodded, his disheveled curls bouncing up and down.  
  
“Yes.” More firmly this time.  
  
Sherlock shook his head at this, then moaned.  
  
“I’m sorry if you don’t like the idea, Sherlock, but you must realize that this simply cannot continue. Surely you don’t want to feel like this again—so ill? Not to mention terrifying your parents. And Mary. And me.”  
  
“No.”  
  
John let his hand wander to the younger man’s neck. Noted that his skin was warm, but not hot. He pressed gently into the skin. Observed. Took his pulse.  
  
“All right. You’re hardly feverish but you’re dehydrated, and that’s going to make you feel worse. Let’s get you downstairs and get some breakfast into you.”  
  
Sherlock moaned again but rolled over and sat up slowly, his eyes still shut.  
  
*  
  
A while later, Sherlock was seated on the sofa. Still dressed in his dad’s pyjamas, he had slowly consumed a slice of toast and a half a bottle of watered-down juice. He had kept his head down the entire time, letting his riot of curls hide his eyes. His mother sat next to him, attempting to get him to eat a bit more but resisting the urge to brush his fringe off his face. John and Mr Holmes were seated nearby, playing backgammon in a desultory way.  
  
“Have you had enough to eat for now?” Mrs Holmes asked softly.  
  
“Yes,” Sherlock sighed. She started to rise and was startled by her younger son’s boney fingers suddenly wrapped around her wrist. “Thank you,” he mumbled.  
  
“Of course, my love,” she replied. “More Tizer?”  
  
“Yes, please,” he responded. He sounded so young, John reflected.  
  
When his mum returned with a fresh bottle of the sweet beverage, Sherlock took it from her, picking at the cap instead of opening it. “Sherlock,” she remonstrated. He rolled his eyes and opened the bottle, obediently taking a small sip. “That’s better,” she remarked, sitting down next to him again.  
  
They sat in silence for a while, the only sound the spill of dice and the faint clatter of pieces being moved around the board.  
  
“Did anyone contact Mycroft?” Sherlock said suddenly, making John jump.  
  
“Not yet, dear. We thought it best not to bother him until we need to,” Mrs Holmes soothed.  
  
“He’ll figure it out anyway,” Mr Holmes pointed out.  
  
Sherlock smiled faintly. “You’re right,” he conceded. “And then there truly will be hell to pay. Oh, God. John, can we go somewhere?”  
  
“Where?”  
  
“I don’t know. Somewhere… else. Somewhere without Big Brother’s eyes on me all the time.” Sherlock groaned and slid down until his head rested on his mother’s shoulder.  
  
“I can’t even _begin_ to fathom where that would be,” John commented. Mr Holmes chuckled quietly.  
  
“Do you ever wish that he and I were more… normal?” Sherlock suddenly asked.  
  
Mrs Holmes snorted. “Dull,” she commented, rolling her eyes.  
  
Oh! John turned in his chair and smiled.  
  
“No, really,” Sherlock interjected, struggling to sit upright. “I mean… regular. Married. Proper jobs. Grandchildren?”  
  
“Well, no, of course not, my sweet. What would the point of that be?”  
  
“I don’t know. It seems to make other people happy.”  
  
“Those are other people, Sherlock. You and Mycroft are exactly who you are meant to be, and your dad and I wouldn’t have you any other way.”  
  
“No?”  
  
“Well, of course there’s always room for improvement…” she admitted, and John snickered. “But honestly, your dad and I are very proud of both of you. And as for grandchildren, well, John and Mary seem to be doing just fine with that.”  
  
“They really do, don’t they,” Sherlock agreed. “I’ve been doing some research on visual stimulation in infants…”  
  
And John laughed while all three of them listened avidly to Sherlock’s observations.  
  
*  
  
A few hours later, John was in 221A.  
  
Mrs Holmes had called Mycroft to send a car. Sherlock and John both had initially groaned at this, but John, being a practical man, had no problem whatsoever saving what would have been an enormous cab fare and was equally fine with not asking Mary to drive back out for them. Sherlock begrudgingly agreed it was the best option, especially after his mother promised that she hadn’t told his brother the specifics of them needing the ride—just that dinner had not agreed with Sherlock and John had stayed over to take care of him. Since Mycroft seemed to assume that Sherlock would cause problems and that John would be there to mop up after him, he hadn’t pressed the issue.  
  
The toast and juice and water had been fine for a while, but then Sherlock began to get tired and, unfortunately, nauseated. He didn’t say anything, though, even though John had asked him several times if he was all right while he got dressed and prepared to head home. He didn’t see Sherlock’s jaw clenching in distress while he thanked Mr and Mrs Holmes profusely for their hospitality and promised to be in touch.  
  
Not long after they started out, John cursed himself for not bringing a bin or even a towel. He did have some bottled water, and that helped for a while, but as the miles ticked by Sherlock got more and more pale, finally turning a familiar shade of grey. Sweat appeared on his upper lip and forehead.  
  
“Thanks,” John said calmly as the driver, who was watching with concern in a small monitor that was apparently hooked up to a CCTV camera facing them, pulled over before he could even say anything. “It’s all right, Sherlock,” he murmured as his friend leaned out the open door and lost what little breakfast he had managed to consume. “Sorry about this,” he said to the driver.  
  
“No worries, mate. I’m used to it. You wouldn’t believe how undignified some dignitaries are, especially after a state dinner.”  
  
“He’s…”  
  
“Oh, don’t worry. Mr Holmes told me his brother was ill at their parents’. Some stomach bug. It happens. There’s more water in the fridge back there.”  
  
“Thanks. Okay, Sherlock?” He opened the bottle of water and handed it to the thin man, who nodded and rinsed out his mouth.  
  
“I’ll have you home soon,” the driver said easily.  
  
And home, as in Baker Street, could not come fast enough. Sherlock slumped back into the deep leather seat, apparently too wiped out even to sigh. John tried to give him a few sips of water as the car pulled smoothly back out into traffic, but he shook his head once, firmly, his eyes and mouth both shut.   
  
“Seriously, I am sorry about this,” John repeated to the driver, who chuckled and waved a hand.  
  
“No worries, mate. I’ve got three kids. It kind of gives you a whole new definition of ‘gross.’”  
  
“Oh. Well. Mine’s still tiny,” John couldn’t help bragging.  
  
“Still on formula?”  
  
“Yeah.”  
  
“Oh, wait’ll you start table food.”  
  
“Any advice?”  
  
“Unless you like showers at two in the morning, don’t ever get bunk beds,” the driver deadpanned. Despite himself, John chuckled, then stopped as he glanced at Sherlock’s sheet-white face.  
  
A few minutes later they pulled onto Baker Street. John was never so happy to see Speedy’s out a car window in his life.  
  
John eased Sherlock up the steps. “Right. Bed for you, my friend,” he directed, and Sherlock shakily attempted to comply, unable to manage even unbuttoning his coat, so John helped him divest himself and change into night clothes. Then, propping him up at the sink so he could clean his teeth, he dashed to the kitchen and found a bottle of juice. He poured half of it into a glass and added some water.  
  
Sherlock had slid into his bed and was nearly asleep. “Do you need more paracetamol or something for your stomach?” the doctor asked.  
  
“Mmph,” came the muffled assent.  
  
Five minutes later the doctor had his friend dosed. He pulled the duvet up over him neatly after putting the remainder of the watered-down juice on the table next to him. The gangly man turned on his side and curled up like a kitten. John sat down next to him and patted his hip. “You think that’s staying down now?” he asked gently.  
  
Sherlock nodded, his eyes almost shut. “Bed’s… not moving,” he mumbled.  
  
And unexpectedly, John chuckled. Sherlock opened his eyes and looked at John suspiciously.  
  
“There’s a CCTV camera in that car,” John explained.  
  
“Obviously.”  
  
“ _That_ will be a feed Mycroft will probably regret watching.”  
  
And despite everything, Sherlock snorted in amusement.  
  
“But, you know, the next time…” the doctor continued gleefully. Sherlock waited. “The next time, just get sick in his bloody car.”  
  
Sherlock actually chuckled at this. “I should have,” he agreed. “I nearly _did_. Would serve him right.”  
  
“Think it through next time. Now get some sleep.” He got off the bed and shut the light, pulling the door halfway shut behind him.  
  
“John?”  
  
“Yeah? You okay?”  
  
“Yes, I… thank you.”  
  
“Go to sleep, Sherlock.”  
  
*  
  
John sank down into the straight-backed chair at Mrs Hudson’s kitchen table and let her fuss over him. Tea and two kinds of her best biscuits (he did have quite a fondness for ones that she made to look like hedgehogs) and she sat down across from him and just waited.  
  
And he told her. Not everything, of course, but the basics: Sherlock was using and was also apparently reliving in some form the abuse he had endured as a child. He made it clear that Mr and Mrs Holmes were not to be blamed.  
  
“Well, he shouldn’t be working. All those horrible cases can’t be helping,” she said wisely.  
  
“No. In fact, they seem to be triggering specific and extremely unpleasant memories for him,” John admitted.  
  
“But if he’s not working, he gets bored,” she went on, “and that never ends well.”  
  
“Yeah. Trying to figure out what to do.”  
  
“Well, for now, I’ll keep an eye on him. I’ll make him some nice soup for when he wakes up—something gentle.”  
  
“That would be wonderful,” John agreed.  
  
She thought for a few seconds. “Maybe you should…”  
  
“Should what?” John was tired and eager to get home to his wife and baby. Sherlock was so weak he probably would just sleep for the next sixteen hours or so; it wouldn’t be the first time.  
  
“Maybe a nice holiday,” she offered.  
  
“Holiday?”  
  
“Yes. Out of town for a few days. Out of London. With you and Mary and the baby. He always seems to perk up when he sees the baby,” she pointed out.  
  
“Yeah,” John responded slowly. “Yes. I think we will. That might actually be brilliant. Thank you, Mrs Hudson. I think I’ve got to head home now.”  
  
She beamed. “Oh, please kiss Mary and the baby for me!” she called out as he exited.  
  



	6. Travelling

“We’re going on holiday.”  
  
“Have fun.”  
  
“No, I mean _we_ are going. All of us. Me, and Mary, and the baby, and you.”  
  
“Don’t be an idiot, John. I don’t go on holiday, and if I did, it certainly wouldn’t be with yo… your wife and child.”  
  
“Tough. Mary and I discussed it. We’re going, and you’re coming with us.”  
  
“Why?” Sherlock pouted, concentrating fiercely on the pipette and beaker in front of him. Concentrating on not letting his hands shake, really.  
  
“Why? Why?! Because you’re so strung out you called Lestrade ‘Greg’ at the crime scene yesterday.”  
  
“Isn’t that his name?” Sherlock spoke slowly, as if to a child, or possibly a dog.  
  
“Exactly. You never call him by his first name, let alone the right one.”  
  
“So let me get this straight,” Sherlock hissed, the acid dripping from his voice echoing the acid dripping off the pipette into the beaker. “Because I happened to finally call someone by his given name, you want to haul me off to God-knows-where to sit on some beach, surrounded by masses of overheated idiots and their awful music and all the talking—”  
  
Sherlock stopped suddenly with a strangled sound. John looked down and grabbed his wrist. “Oi!” he shouted. “Be careful with that, Sherlock!” He directed the hand with the dripping pipette back over the beaker, frowning at what was probably acid burn number fifty on the poor table. Then he looked at the detective’s face. He had grown pale, with a far-away look in his eyes. “All right, that’s it. Put it down.” He pulled gently on the wrist that he still held, encouraging Sherlock to drop the pipette into the beaker. He then tugged at it. “Come over here. Sit down.” He directed the younger man to his chair, pushing him gently into it by his shoulders. He then pulled his own chair closer and sat on the edge of it, putting his hands on Sherlock’s knees.  
  
“Come on now. You’re scaring me. Come back.”  
  
Sherlock blinked and started, looking down at John’s hands and then at himself, obviously puzzled as to how he had gotten in the chair.  
  
“Yes, you’re sitting down now for a bit, and then you’re going to have something to eat.”  
  
“Not hungry,” Sherlock replied automatically.  
  
“I know that, but we’re going to eat anyway, and then we’re going to get you packed, and then Mary is going to pick us up, and we are going to drive to a very nice, quiet B&B in the country, and you are going to rest.”  
  
“Dull.”  
  
“Yes. That’s the idea. No crowds. No people. No crimes. Just books and walks and maybe some sight-seeing.”  
  
“Boring. What if Lestrade needs me?”  
  
“Nope. I talked to him, and he’s put the word out to all the criminals in London to lay off for a few days.”  
  
“My experiment…”  
  
“No. You need a rest. And you get to carry the baby.”  
  
For the first time since John had arrived that morning, Sherlock looked— not exactly happy or relaxed, but certainly less tense.  
  
“Well, she is nice to carry,” he admitted quietly.  
  
John smiled and patted a boney knee. “All right, now? Let’s see if there’s anything non-toxic in the fridge, yeah?”  
  
One breakfast and five days’ worth of clothing and books later (John decided not to quibble about which books they were, and resisted rolling his eyes when Sherlock had rapidly downloaded three new ones onto his tablet—one on poisonous plants, one on poisonous insects, and one called _The Poisoner’s Handbook_ ; at least he was focusing on a theme), he looked out the window.  
  
“Mary’s here,” he announced.  
  
“Are you really making me do this?” Sherlock whined.  
  
“Yes. Yes I am.” And John marched out of the room and down the stairs before Sherlock could reply.  
  
They got settled, Mary sliding into the back next to the baby seat and John slipping behind the wheel. Sherlock had apparently decided to go along with their plans, at least for the moment. He popped his bag into the boot and rolled his eyes at the gear already there.  
  
“Why is it that small humans need so much… stuff?” he asked Mary as he got into the passenger seat.  
  
“Honestly, I wonder that myself,” she admitted, stifling a yawn. Small Miss Watson was not even remotely inclined to sleep through the night, and both Mary and John had permanent dark circles under their eyes. “I mean, when we were still living in caves, no one had any pressing need for a pram, _and_ a pushchair, _and_ a car seat, _and_ a changing bag, _and_ a bottle sterilizer...” She laughed.  
  
Sherlock was busy smiling at the guilty party.  
  
“You all set for a few days off?” she asked him.  
  
“I suppose. John made me throw away my experiment,” Sherlock pouted as John pulled into traffic.  
  
“Oh, poor you,” Mary teased. “You need this. Get London out of your lungs for a few days.”  
  
“I _like_ having London in my lungs,” he retorted lightly. John grinned. This was going better than anticipated. He thought about how Mrs Hudson’s face had lit up when he had told her.  
  
“I’ll give the place a good, thorough cleaning while you’re away,” she promised. “See that he eats and sleeps and… oh dear. I’m sorry.”  
  
“It’s all right, Mrs H. All we want to do is get him to rest. Eat. Sleep.”  
  
She had patted his arm affectionately and of course had come out to see Mary and the baby when they arrived. She had been cooing over both of them when Sherlock surged out onto the street with his bag.  
  
“Good luck,” she had whispered to Mary.  
  
“Thank you,” Mary had whispered back.  
  
“Have a lovely time, Sherlock,” she had called, going back inside.  
  
An hour into their drive, the baby had made her presence known. “Oh, my,” Mary had commented drily, opening her window. John pulled into a lay by a few minutes later so his daughter could be changed, and possibly hosed down.  
  
“I’ll do it,” Sherlock offered.  
  
“Oh, will you?” Mary had sighed. “Thank you.”  
  
Mary and John had both been flabbergasted the first time he had done so. He had shrugged. “It’s no worse than anything I’ve ever crawled through.” And that had been true. “In fact, it’s not nearly as bad as what I encountered the last time John forced me to take the Tube.”  
  
Mary had shaken her head in mock pity. “Oh, poor dear,” she had giggled.  
  
“It was horrible. All those people… I’d rather deal with a nasty nappy. Hand her over.”  
  
And so had begun a pattern.  
  
“You know the rules.” It was a statement, not a question. Sherlock nodded, then reached in and unbuckled the cooing baby from her seat.  
  
Rule one: No taking samples.  
  
Rule two: No deductions about the baby’s diet.  
  
Rule three: Other than Sherlock, only John, Mary, Mrs Hudson, Lestrade, and Sherlock’s parents could touch the baby.  
  
Rule four: Sherlock must absolutely, positively be clean and sober or he could not touch or even be near the baby. Period.  
  
He shook his head. “Well, Miss Watson, you have certainly outdone yourself this time,” he murmured as he slung the changing bag over one shoulder and the baby over the other and strode off toward the family toilets.  
  
John watched him go, shaking his head. “I will never, ever understand that man,” he offered.  
  
“No,” Mary replied, opening the other windows. “Probably all for the best.”  
  
After their break, Sherlock offered to drive, and John willingly gave him the wheel. Better than risking the man getting bored. The address of the B&B was programmed into the GPS. Mary and the baby both dozed off in the back seat.  
  
John had already described the B&B to Sherlock. It was small; just two guest rooms with a shared en suite. They would therefore be the only guests. The proprietor was fine with infants (and pets, Mary had interjected with a grin; Sherlock mock-frowned at her). It was isolated and quiet, but there were things to do in the towns nearby.  
  
And Sherlock was under strict orders to relax.  
  
“Whose idea was this anyway?” he had grumbled.  
  
“You haven’t deduced it?” John shot back, surprised. “You _are_ tired.”  
  
Sherlock had frowned. He looked at John intently, then at Mary. “Oh. Mrs Hudson. Wonderful.” He rolled his eyes. “And you told Lestrade? And my parents?”  
  
“Well, I didn’t have to tell Mycroft, did I?” John shot back.  
  
“True.”  
  
*  
  
It was midafternoon. The café was nearly empty. They got a nice table by the window. Sherlock had taken charge of the baby. He perched her in her carrier on the chair next to him, facing out into the dining room, and was murmuring deductions about the other diners into the peach fuzz on her head. He had frowned at the menu, so John ordered him a sensible lunch, knowing that half of whatever he ordered for himself would be what Sherlock would actually eat.  
  
John and Mary both tucked happily into their meals when they arrived. Sherlock poked disinterestedly at his, but when John turned his plate so the chips were closer to the thin man, he unabashedly began eating them. With his fingers. John rolled his eyes but smiled, and Mary giggled into her shepherd’s pie.  
  
“When it comes time to learn table manners, you are not in charge,” she commented. Sherlock had the decency to look ever so slightly chagrinned before picking up his fork.  
  
They had just finished up and Mary was debating on pudding when the commotion started. There was a family seated a few tables away—a father, mother, and boy, who appeared to be about seven. Sherlock had, of course, noted when they had been seated, and he had whispered something to the baby as his piercing eyes swept over all three. He had been frowning.  
  
And now, the woman began to shriek. “Arthur? Arthur! Are you all right? Oh, God! Someone please help! He’s choking!”  
  
John was up and at the table before she completed her eighth word, Mary right behind him.  
  
Sure enough, the boy was turning a terrible color and clutching at his throat, but he was completely silent. No coughing or gasping. His airway was completely blocked.  
  
It was over in less than sixty seconds. John had yanked the boy’s chair away from the table, pulled him to stand up, and applied five brisk blows between his shoulder blades. When that didn’t work, he positioned himself behind the now shaking child and firmly but gently dislodged the object from the boy’s throat with one thrust of his fist against his ribcage.  
  
Mary was holding the boy’s mother’s shoulders, keeping her still, whispering to her that it would be all right, her husband was a doctor and her son would be fine.  
  
The boy’s father sat, watching, his expression unreadable until whatever had been blocking the boy’s airway had been expelled. Then his lip curled in disgust.  
  
The mother was sobbing and holding her son tightly. His color was returning to normal and he was crying.  
  
“Oh, thank you, thank you, thank you,” the mother cried, reaching out and grabbing John’s hand.  
  
“I’m just glad I could help,” he said in a low voice.  
  
Mary patted her arm and stroked the boy’s cheek. “All right now? Yes, you’re all right. What a brave boy. You’ll be fine now. Just fine,” she murmured, reaching for a serviette to wipe his cheeks.  
  
“All right now,” the father suddenly interjected. John looked down at him sharply. “Come on, Beryl, we’re getting out of here.” He stood and began to stride toward the door. “And if you think I’m paying for that crap food…” he shouted over his shoulder.  
  
“I’ve… we’ve got to go,” Beryl said to Mary, hurriedly pushing away from the table, her son clutched in her arms. And she practically ran out the door behind her husband.  
  
John wiped his hand down his face. “Well, then,” he mumbled. A member of the wait staff began cleaning up. He looked over to their own table. Sherlock had risen and taken the baby from her carrier. He was holding her in one arm and looking intently out the window at the car park. He was whispering to her. He was frowning. No. Scowling.  
  
And then he was spinning around, thrusting the baby in John’s arms, and dashing out the door. And his expression was about as dark as John had ever seen it.  
  
“Oh, fuck,” John commented quietly. He handed the baby to a startled Mary and dashed after him.  
  
“Get your hands off him,” Sherlock said slowly, his voice dangerously low. The little family stood frozen in front of him, the father kneeling in front of his small son. He had a meaty hand wrapped around a thin upper arm, not quite covering a mixture of old and fresh bruises. The father suddenly shook himself, rose, and stepped up to Sherlock. He was almost four inches taller and outweighed the detective by a good three stone.  
  
“What’d you say?” he spat out.  
  
“I said, get your hands off him, and take back what you called him.”  
  
“What I… wha--?” The ferocious stare of the uncouth man faltered.  
  
“What you called him. Your son could have died back there, and your reaction was to call him a waste of sp…” Sherlock stopped suddenly, unwilling to repeat the word. John realized that Sherlock had probably read the man’s lips through the window. God.  
  
“You bastard!”  
  
He swung.  
  
Sherlock ducked, then came up, fist first.  
  
It was over before John took another three steps.  
  
“Ooof!” exclaimed the larger man as Sherlock’s hard fist came into abrupt and intimate contact with his solar plexus. He fell to his knees, gasping for air, as Sherlock stepped back.  
  
“See how that feels?” Sherlock ground out between clenched teeth. “Not being able to breathe?”  
  
“Sod… off…” the man choked out.  
  
John heard the café door open behind him. Oh, good. They had an audience now.  
  
“You could at least be grateful to the man who saved his life,” Sherlock said quietly. He seemed to be losing his momentum. The faint flush of color that had graced his cheeks was fading. Rapidly. Oh, shit, John thought. He’s going to pass out.  
  
He stepped forward as he heard the sirens approaching. Oh, joy. The police. Just what they needed.  
  
*  
  
It took over two hours to sort things out. Mary and John had given statements. Sherlock had retreated to a table in the café, cradling the baby possessively, and Mary, after a moment’s trepidation, had let him. The little family was now a furious, red-faced lout in the back of a police car and a worn-out, exhausted young mother and son in the back of an ambulance.  
  
Sherlock had finally been questioned. John had had to intervene, of course, explaining _sotto voce_ to the officer that the pale, thin man suffered from a psychological disorder and that he and his wife, a doctor and nurse, were taking their charge for a “long rest” in a quiet “place.” The questioning and the decidedly Sherlock-skewed answers had gone better after the understanding nod and wink John had gotten in return.  
  
“Well, if he swung first—and that bastard always does—then it’s self-defence and no charges that I’d be willing to book you for,” the officer said pleasantly, nodding in an encouraging fashion. “It’s not the first time we’ve picked up that bugger, but I am going to make sure it’s the last. This’ll get Beryl and Arthur out of his hands for good, this will.”  
  
Sherlock nodded distractedly. His eyes had wandered and he was looking out the window again.  
  
Mary looked up from the pudding she had suddenly been famished for. The baby was back in her carrier and sound asleep, and John was sitting quietly next to them, just watching Sherlock.  
  
As the officer closed his note pad and rose, he did as well. “Thanks, mate,” he said genially, thrusting out a hand toward Sherlock. Sherlock whipped his head around from the window and stared at it with an odd expression.  
  
“I need a cigarette,” he responded, and before John could say anything was out the door.  
  
“Sorry,” John offered the astonished officer, who was staring at Sherlock’s departing back in dismay. “I did warn you.”  
  
“Yeah. Yeah, you did. Is he always like that?”  
  
“Rude? Yeah, pretty much.” John chuckled.  
  
“No, I mean the other stuff. He was telling me why I shouldn’t worry about how to pay for my daughter’s public school since she’ll get a science scholarship. How the…”  
  
John shook his head and tutted in approved medical fashion. “Savant,” he offered sagely.  
  
“Ah,” came the bewildered reply.  
  
“Can we go now?” He glanced toward the door worriedly as Mary began to gather their things. They accepted another round of thanks from the café’s owner and responded politely if insincerely to the invitation to come eat at no charge, any time. John, toting the changing bag and Mary’s jumper, found his feet edging toward the door of their own accord.  
  
“Oh, thank God,” he murmured as they approached their car. Sherlock was hunched in the front passenger seat, his feet on the seat and his arms wrapped around his knees. He had retrieved his Belstaff, which he had not been wearing in the mild afternoon, and was wrapped in it, his face shadowed up to the too-prominent cheekbones by the turned-up collar.  
  
Mary got the baby into her seat and slid in next to her without a word. John got behind the wheel, started the motor, and drove off toward the setting sun.  
  



	7. Getting There

John was somewhat astounded and Mary elated. They had actually gotten through the first night at the B&B. The remainder of their drive had been quiet and strained. Both Mary and John had tried distracting Sherlock, and the baby had fussed and cried so much that Mary had ended up giving her a bottle as they drove. Sherlock had remained silent, his eyes fixed on the road rushing under their wheels.  
  
He had maintained his silence as they checked in, helping without being asked with the baby’s gear but not even looking in the direction of the proprietor of the lovely house.  
  
Mary had explained, quietly and quickly, that they had had a bit of trouble on the drive, and was there somewhere they could get some take away? The owner of the B&B, cooing over the baby and frowning sympathetically as Mary explained what they had been through, had nodded and waved her hand for Mary to follow her into the kitchen, where she kept some menus.  
  
While John and Sherlock brought their belongings to their rooms, Mary selected the only place that delivered and called in an order. The baby chewed thoughtfully on the menu and the proprietor smiled and tickled her and then, forever endearing her to Mary, produced a large bottle of wine to go with the Italian meal that would soon arrive.  
  
Sherlock had stayed quiet while they ate in the sitting room. Mary and John had tucked in happily, chatting about what they might do the next day with the owner while he very seriously counted the baby’s fingers and toes for her, humming what John was fairly sure was Vivaldi.  
  
“Come on, Sherlock,” John had finally said. He rose and carried his container of chicken parmesan over to the sofa. The baby was starting to look sleepy. He sat on the sofa with them and held the food in front of the detective, who looked up, startled.  
  
“Dinner?” Sherlock said in surprise, as if he was suddenly aware of its presence.  
  
“Yeah. Take a bite. Come on,” John smiled gently. He stabbed a bit of chicken with his fork and offered it to his friend. And held his breath.  
  
And Sherlock took the bite. The proprietor raised her eyebrows. John ignored her and Mary prattled on. Another bite. Sherlock continued to play with the baby’s toes and John continued to feed him until the chicken was all gone and Sherlock was looking as sleepy as the baby.  
  
“All right, you two. Bedtime,” John said sweetly. “Good night, all.”  
  
Mary blew him a kiss and waited until the sound of their footsteps had faded overhead.  
  
“So, well… yes. We did explain that our friend was a bit… special needs.”  
  
“Yes, you did say so. I just didn’t realize…” the owner of the B&B, an extremely well-educated and well-spoken women of middle age, shook her head.  
  
“Oh, don’t worry. John has him well under control. He’s really just a big baby.”  
  
“He dresses very nicely,” the proprietor commented a bit wryly.  
  
“Old money,” Mary agreed sagely. “I’ll be honest. His family pays us oodles to take care of him.” And she grinned brilliantly and helped with the washing up.  
  
When she finally headed up the stairs, she walked quietly and opened the door to their room with trepidation. John smiled tiredly at her. He was stretched out on their bed in his pyjamas, a book in hand and the bedside lamp the only light. She could hear light breathing from the portable crib. She tip-toed across the room and looked down at their precious daughter, who was sleeping like an angel.  
  
She looked toward the en suite bathroom, her eyebrows raised. Sherlock’s room was on the other side of it, with doors to both rooms joining them. “Is he okay?” she mouthed.  
  
“Go check,” he mouthed back, tipping his head.  
  
She did. Mary might have lost a tiny bit of her svelte figure to pregnancy, but she had lost none of her cat burglar skills. John shook his head at himself. That really wasn’t something to admire in one’s spouse, was it now, he thought, watching her as she moved silently through the door and into the adjoining room. She was back a minute later, beaming.  
  
“He’s out like a light,” she reported.  
  
“I pray to God he stays like that,” John sighed back.  
  
And to their great surprise, he had.  
  
*  
  
The first real day of their holiday they actually had a brilliant time. Mary had discovered a few fun things that they could do with a baby and a large infant in tow. Sherlock had been subdued; distracted. He had wanted to spend most of his time with the baby and they had let him. It seemed to keep him calm. He had nibbled off John’s plate during all three meals, drank water when Mary had told him to, and not once mentioned the incident of the day before.  
  
John had thoroughly searched Sherlock’s bag and coat, and then, as an afterthought, his and Mary’s bags. And after a very long, painful thought, the baby’s bags. He had removed most of the cash he had found in the detective’s wallet, and a few other things that he had flushed without comment. He stuck to Sherlock like a shadow the entire day, not even letting him use a public loo without company. Whether or not Sherlock noticed, he didn’t say anything.  
  
They had found a pleasant, family-friendly place for dinner, and as the evening darkened, walked back to the B&B. Without a word, Sherlock had disappeared upstairs, and John had followed. The owner, who had greeted them upon their return, raised her eyebrows a bit.  
  
“Long day,” Mary commented calmly, plunking the baby down on the sofa and sitting herself a bit heavily down next to her.  
  
“Was everything… all right?” the kind woman asked.  
  
“It was actually lovely, thank you. I’m ready for a good, sound sleep… but I think I’ll let them get sorted first.”  
  
The wine was even lovelier the second evening.  
  
It was the second night that had brought the nightmares.  
  
2.47  
  
Mary had woken up and sighed. The baby was wailing and she knew what for. She smiled the tiniest bit as she picked up her tiny daughter. John and Sherlock were actually fairly brilliant with her, and Mrs Hudson positively doted on her, but only she, Mary Watson, could provide what she called her “portable snacks.” She had settled sleepily into the lovely armchair in their room (their proprietor had not been even remotely kidding when she advertised “infants welcome”; in the course of their evening chat Mary had learned that she had raised nine children in this very house and clearly knew exactly what was needed) and fed her daughter.  
  
Finally, the tiny mouth stopped its sucking. She tucked herself back into her nightgown and lifted the baby to her shoulder. A quick burp and nappy change and she’d be back in bed, asleep, in ten minutes, she told herself.  
  
And then she heard it. She froze, her hand hovering over her daughter’s back, mid-pat.  
  
“I’m sorry, Father.”  
  
From Sherlock’s room. Sherlock’s voice.  
  
She glanced over at her husband. He was sound asleep, snoring very lightly. She didn’t have the heart to awaken him.  
  
“All right, my little princess?” she asked the infant on her shoulder. The baby gave a delicate burp in reply. “Excellent. Let’s go rescue Uncle Sherlock, shall we?”  
  
She slipped into Sherlock’s room through the bathroom. He had fallen asleep on top of the duvet, with the bedside lamp on.  
  
And now he was sitting up. She stared at him in fascination.  
  
John occasionally had nightmares, and he occasionally talked in his sleep. This was different.  
  
Sherlock’s bright eyes were open, but at a glance she could tell he wasn’t seeing her or the baby or the dim room. They stared at something she couldn’t see. It was so eerie and so… earnest, she realized later, that she actually glanced behind her.  
  
“I’m sorry,” he echoed, and she shivered, hugging the baby close to her. She had never heard anything like it.  
  
“Sherlock?” she said, uncertainly.  
  
“Please don’t choke me.”  
  
Oh God.  
  
“Please! No. Please don’t. No. No no no I won’t show anyone the bruises. I promise! I’ll keep my scarf on. Please! Father. NO!”  
  
Mary couldn’t stand it a second longer. She dropped to her knees on the bed. “Oh, Sherlock! Please. Please wake up!” she begged.  
  
And Sherlock woke up. His eyelids drooped, then lifted again. He squinted in the dim light. Wiped ineffectively at the tears that ran down his face. “Mary?” His voice was shaky.  
  
“Yeah, love. I’m here. It’s Mary and the baby. Do you need a cuddle?” she offered. He nodded. She carefully handed him the baby, who was dozing off. “Hey, if I grab a nappy, would you change her for me? I’m knackered,” she offered casually. He nodded again. She slid backwards off the bed and nipped back to her room, grabbed the changing bag, and dashed back. To her great relief Sherlock had laid the baby on her back and was telling her, very seriously, the stages of rigor mortis.  
  
“All right, here’s her gear,” she offered breathlessly.  
  
And in his usual efficient and graceful fashion, he had changed the baby, snapped her up again, and handed her back to Mary.  
  
“You all right to sleep now?” she asked.  
  
“Why wouldn’t I be?” he snapped back.  
  
“No reason. Good night.” Mary wanted to cry. She rose to leave.  
  
“Mary.”  
  
“Yes?”  
  
“I’m sorry.”  
  
She sat back down on the bed. “What, love?” she murmured.  
  
“I’m… aware that I’m an enormous pain in the arse.”  
  
“What? No.” And Mary wasn’t surprised to realize that she meant it.  
  
“I am. I’m horrible. I’ve been horrible.”  
  
“Well, these past few months you’ve been a bit… stressed,” she responded delicately. The baby gave a small sigh and drifted into a deeper sleep on her shoulder.  
  
“I… yes.” He reached his hands out. They were trembling. She handed him her sleeping daughter and he sighed contentedly as he cradled her in his arms.  
  
“What’s been going on, Sherlock?” she asked. Unlike John, Mary preferred the direct approach.  
  
“I don’t know,” he admitted. He buried his face in the baby’s tummy.  
  
“Sherlock, you… you must know. You of all people.” She spoke a bit sharply.  
  
There was silence.  
  
“Sherlock. You know I love you. And I trust you with my daughter and with my husband.”  
  
“Yes.” Oh, God. He sounded so young.  
  
“And we’re very worried about you,” she continued.  
  
“Yes. I am aware.” She smiled at his snipe.  
  
“So maybe talking about it would help with the nightmares and the…”  
  
Sherlock’s eyes narrowed. “The what?” he demanded. “The drugs?”  
  
“Well of course the drugs!” she snapped. The baby whimpered and Sherlock murmured assurances through her sleepsuit.  
  
“I’m clean!” he hissed at her mother.  
  
“Right now—this moment—yes, or my daughter would _not_ be in your arms,” she hissed. “But, Christ, Sherlock! What’s been going on with you? All right, there was a bit of fallout…” she faltered. Yes, Mary. A bit of fallout—from her _shooting_ Sherlock, him flatlining, sneaking out of hospital, revealing her to John, flatlining again, and eventually shooting a man in the head to save her and her husband… yes. A Bit Not Good. But this was something else. She concentrated as best she could at 3 AM.  
  
“I don’t _know_.” The honesty in the slim man’s voice was undeniable. Sherlock Holmes hated not knowing. _Admitting_ that he didn’t know seemed to exhaust him utterly.  
  
“All right. But you won’t deny there’s something… off,” she offered.  
  
“No.”  
  
“Well, I think that we need to figure it out before you end up back in hospital or… or worse. I don’t think I could bear it. I know John couldn’t. Or your parents.”  
  
Despite the extremity of his anguish and his sometimes rather deliberate overlooking of human emotions and motives, Sherlock snorted and rolled his eyes. “Can you believe her?” he murmured into the baby’s tummy. “Thinks she can just get me sobbing out my whole life story like on one of those awful programmes with just one mention of my parents.”  
  
The baby sucked once in her sleep as a response, and he cuddled her closely.  
  
“Well, you can’t blame a girl for trying,” Mary offered, grinning weakly. He shrugged and his eyes wandered past her, toward the window. It was a bright night. They sat in silence for a few minutes. Mary found her head nodding and eyelids drooping. She roused herself with a start. Sherlock was staring out the window, oblivious to her presence. Mary gently dislodged her infant daughter from his hands and crept back to bed.  
  
She prayed that the rest of the night would be quiet.  
  
*  
  
The rest of their holiday had passed without incident. Sherlock remained quiet. He would only eat off John’s plate, and barely enough to keep functioning, but at least he ate. He would only go to bed if they all went to bed at the same time, and he wouldn’t drop off to sleep without cuddling the baby. They left the doors to the en suite open at night. Neither Mary nor John begrudged him the loss of privacy; they wanted to be able to hear him.  
  
The silence was eerie. No deductions. No complaints about being bored. They hadn’t allowed him out of their sight when they were out the entire trip, so they knew he was clean, but they shot worried looks at each other.  
  
Finally they were packing up to go home. Sherlock had remained quiet, compliant, possessive of the baby but willing and even polite when giving her up to Mary.  
  
Not to John.  
  
John was not an idiot (despite objections to the contrary by one Mr Holmes the Younger). He noticed.  
  
He did understand why. But it hurt anyway. He was heartened by the fact that Sherlock would only eat off his plate. And he did understand that, essentially, Sherlock Holmes’ brilliant brain was, at this point, scrambled eggs. He had been clean for no more than three weeks, and there were times when John really wondered if that were entirely true. He might be off the hard stuff—or at least there had been no overtly manic periods or withdrawal—but there were times when he seemed to be hardly conscious of his own body, let alone what was going on around him. It was different from his mind-palace wanderings. He didn’t really drink (ironically and belatedly John realized that Sherlock was a ‘social’ drinker—granted that Sherlock’s ‘society’ was just him—but really, Sherlock did _not_ drink alcohol when he was on his own). His cigarettes were incidental at this point—a nasty but comprehendible habit, and he was fairly agreeable about using patches instead most of the time. And John had flushed the few things he had found.  
  
So what the hell was he taking? Was he taking anything? Or were the moods just that—moods? And if that was what they were, did John have the slightest right to say anything?  
  
John didn’t offer the wheel to Sherlock. They were packed up—the taller man had willingly carried down all of the baby’s things and packed them away into the boot. He had buckled her into her infant carrier in the back seat by himself, murmuring the periodic table of elements to her and tickling her toes through her light blue socks. Then he had, without a word, plunked himself into the front passenger seat, his Belstaff collar pulled up.  
  
Mary and John had exchanged significant looks before John announced, loudly, that Mary would be driving and he’d be in the back with the baby.  
  
“No,” Sherlock had said.  
  
“No?” John had queried. He wasn’t planning to put up a fight; he just wanted to know what was in the other man’s head.  
  
“Mary or I stay in back with the baby.”  
  
John took a deep breath. This was going to be as delicate as surgery.  
  
“Okay. Fine. That’s fine. Just… can you tell me _why_?”  
  
Sherlock tried. He really did. His mouth opened. Closed. He looked briefly at Mary, who looked about ready to burst into tears.  
  
And then he had run.  
  
Cursing, John had run after him.  
  
Eating regularly really was a plus, John realized, as he slowly but surely caught up with the lanky git in his ridiculous coat. Sherlock, starved and weak after weeks of not eating well, had (apparently) no idea he wasn’t at his usual level of physical agility.  
  
He put up quite a fight, John had to admit later, but it was actually painfully easy for the ex-army doctor to catch up to and quite literally trip the detective. He had him down on the pavement—Sherlock on his back and John straddling him, holding his tossing head in his steady hands.  
  
“What.” It wasn’t a question. It was a statement. John had had enough.  
  
Sherlock struggled, but didn’t say a word.  
  
John released his hold on Sherlock’s dark curls and ran them gently down the sides of his face. He noted that his eyes were watering, his pupils were dilated, and that his pulse rate was elevated beyond what even the running should have elicited.  
  
“Did you take something?” he asked, almost easily, holding Sherlock’s wrists, one in each strong hand.  
  
“No!” Sherlock turned his head away. John was no longer sure if the wetness on his cheeks was simply his eyes watering or actual tears.  
  
“Then what?” John stated quietly. He settled himself in comfortably. He had no intention whatsoever of letting the bastard up before he got some kind of answer.  
  
“I… uh…”  
  
“Yes?” Crisp. Official. No answer. “Sherlock. What. Did. You. Take?”  
  
“I didn’t take anything!” His eyes shifted up. John noted they were bloodshot; their usual brilliance dimmed.  
  
“You’re lying.” John was so calm it was frightening.  
  
“I am not! I swear. I did not _take_ anything!” Sherlock was starting to sound frantic.  
  
John thought about this. He considered it. The possibility of Sherlock, one of the world’s most precise men, playing word games with him flashed in front of him, a veritable billboard. And then it occurred to him—so obvious it was embarrassing, really.  
  
“Okay. So you didn’t _take_ anything. What did you _do_?”  
  
And John nearly fell over in horror and disgust—at himself—when Sherlock crumbled to bits beneath him.  
  
*  
  
Back to the B&B, where Mary had brought the baby back inside. Murmured apologies to the proprietor. Dragging Sherlock into the loo. Stripping him.  
  
Half an hour later, they were bundled into the car. Mary was driving. John was in the front passenger seat. Sherlock and the baby were in the back seat.  
  
And John Watson, formerly a captain of the Fifth Northumberland Fusiliers, talented doctor, dedicated husband, and loving father, wept.  
  
He wept for his old flatmate, who was seated not two feet from him but was a million miles away.  
  
He wept for the brilliant detective he had come to know, whose brain was so tangled up he barely knew what city he was in.  
  
And John wept for his best friend, who, faced with the absence of drugs, had sliced into his own body over, and over, and over as a means of eliciting something other than what he was feeling.


	8. Evening

“Hey, Greg. Thanks for meeting me.” John slid into the booth Lestrade had claimed in the back of the pub. There was a beer already waiting for him.  
  
“No problem, mate. I’ve been wanting to talk to you.”  
  
“I presume we both need to talk about the same thing.”  
  
“Sherlock? Yeah. We do. He’s a mess, John. I can’t use him. Can’t even _talk_ to him. I went over a few nights before you went on holiday, just to check on him, you know? Chat about an old case. And he was flying. Just. Bloody. Flying. Talking nonsense. More than usual, I mean. Going a mile a minute on about seven different things at once and he couldn’t sit still for two seconds together. Couldn’t look me in the eye. He’s lost more weight, too. Looks ghastly. His kitchen is a positive tip.”  
  
John sighed and took a pull on his beer.  
  
“Sorry,” Lestrade offered, suddenly realizing that he had been ranting.  
  
“‘S all right. Sherlock tends to bring out the rant in all of us these days. The holiday was a disaster.”  
  
“What?”  
  
“Well, not entirely. Never mind. Look, something happened. After all that crap with Magnussen. I think it was related, but I can’t be sure. Something that triggered… here. I’ve found out something about Sherlock that makes me absolutely bloody sick, and I think it’s making him sick, too.”  
  
Greg leaned forward, glancing around to ensure that no one else was close enough to hear. “What did you find out?” he said slowly.  
  
And John hesitated. He wouldn’t want someone spilling that type of information about him, if he was in that position. He didn’t even like it when people acknowledged that they knew about his sister and her problems. But he also knew that he was completely out of his depth and his best friend desperately needed help and he was going to seek it wherever he could.  
  
“What do you know about his father?”  
  
Lestrade cringed. “You mean his… the bastard that…”  
  
So he knew already. Good. One hurdle down.  
  
“Yeah, that one. What do you know?”  
  
And so Greg Lestrade, over the course of two beers each, told John about some of his experiences with Sherlock, back when he was using and hanging about at crime scenes and practically dancing when Lestrade, then a detective sergeant, paid him the least bit of attention.  
  
“He was brilliant. Always. You know how he can be. He’d be shaking like a leaf, his eyes like fucking black holes, and still pulling deductions out of his arse that made us look like complete morons. He’d talk so fast I could barely understand it all, but he was always right. The fucker.”  
  
John nodded, encouraging him to continue.  
  
“So one time he outsmarted himself. Crashed right at a scene. It was a nasty one, too—abused kid lit her dad on fire. He was there because of me, so I got the joyous job of taking him home. But he was such a mess…” Lestrade paused, a pained look on his face as he remembered. He took a drink. “Anyway, I couldn’t just dump him off—this was before Montague Street, even, and he was living in an absolute tip—alone. So I took him back to my place.” John started doing the math, but Lestrade saved him. “I was between wives at the time,” he offered nonchalantly. “Anyway, he crashed pretty hard. He got this killer headache. Almost screaming in pain. I didn’t know what to do. I mean, I gave him something—just regular headache tablets—and tried to get him to drink something.”  
  
Lestrade paused as he recalled the moment. Shook his grizzled head. Continued, his voice tight.  
  
“And he dropped the glass. I mean, I wasn’t surprised. He was shaking so much I was amazed that he was still on the sofa.”  
  
“But he overreacted,” John supplied.  
  
“Big time. Flipped out completely. Started saying over and over how sorry he was and that he’d clean it up and he’d be more careful and…” Lestrade’s voice broke.  
  
“Please don’t cut him,” John finished, biting his lip.  
  
“Please don’t cut me, _Father_ ,” the detective inspector choked out.  
  
“Yeah,” John sighed.  
  
“So, it’s true?”  
  
“In a way. Not the way you might think. Listen. You’ve met his parents, haven’t you?”  
  
“Yeah. And that’s what doesn’t make sense. His da couldn’t hurt a fly.”  
  
“No, he couldn’t.”  
  
And John explained, as succinctly as he could, what he had learned. Lestrade’s mouth was wide open by the time he was done.  
  
“Oh, the right bastard,” he finally offered as a summation.  
  
“Yeah. And something with all that crap with Magnussen has triggered this… cascade effect. He’s a mess, Greg. I am quite honestly scared for his sanity and his life right now.”  
  
“Can you get him to talk to someone?” Lestrade offered doubtfully, clearly knowing what the response would be.  
  
“Yes, and then I’ll get the Statue of Liberty to walk over from the U.S. and dance with Big Ben.”  
  
Lestrade blinked. “You’re not making much sense, mate,” he offered gently.  
  
“No, I’m probably not,” John agreed. “I haven’t slept properly in ages—between Mary and the baby and Sherlock. I’m worried sick. And right now I have to go home and try to be a husband and father and maybe go to work once in a while.”  
  
Lestrade ran his hand over his face. “Look,” he offered. “I’ve got none of that—the husband and father bit, I mean—at least not like you do. Let me take over for a while, yeah?”  
  
John thought about it. That would be… good. “Can you manage?” he responded, almost eagerly. “I mean, I know you have to work, but he’s got Mrs H and his parents to keep an eye on him sometimes. And at least you could feed him some cold cases, keep him interested?”  
  
“Yeah. Of course. I mean—Christ, John. I just can’t get those images out of my head. How the hell has he dealt with this for so many years?”  
  
“He hasn’t, really,” John pointed out, a bit angrily. “The only thing that’s ever gotten him straight was solving cases. Now he’s such a mess, though—even Mycroft has stopped feeding him work.”  
  
“All right, then. Tell you what. You take a break. Go home and be a dad and a husband and a doctor. I’ll just run round to Baker Street and see what I can do.”  
  
“You’ll pretty much have to move in, you know,” John pointed out.  
  
“There’s a room,” Lestrade countered. “Honestly, it’s no problem.”  
  
“Yeah… there might be,” John offered.  
  
*  
  
Greg Lestrade thought bitterly about his words to John Watson twelve hours later. He had done what he had promised—gone to the detective’s flat. Explained things to Mrs Hudson, who had given him an extra set of keys and a kiss in gratitude. Gone in. Sherlock had been, at that time, dead to the world, his duvet over his head. Greg took the opportunity to do a thorough search of the flat. He was appalled at what he found—it hadn’t even really been hidden. He wrapped it all up and locked it in his car. Then he searched again. And again.  
  
He checked on Sherlock from the doorway of his room. Still asleep, but he was stirring a bit. Greg frowned and stepped fully into the detective’s bedroom. Sherlock sat bolt upright, his eyes wide open but not seeing.  
  
“No, no, no! Please don’t make me eat that. I’ll be sick. I promise you, I’ll be sick. It’s disgusting…” he gasped. “I’m sorry. I’m so sorry. I didn’t mean that. It’s just that meat makes me feel ill…” he gasped again. “All right, all right. I’ll eat it.” He began to make horrible choking sounds.  
  
Lestrade hurried over to the bed and sat down next to Sherlock. He gently grasped his shoulders, his eyes widening in horror at how thin they felt. “Sherlock,” he said firmly. “Wake up. It’s Lestrade, mate. Come on, wake up.”  
  
Sherlock came around slowly, his thin chest heaving as he gasped for breath.  
  
“What?” he muttered, coughing.  
  
“Hey. It’s me. Lestrade. Come on. Lie back down. It’s all right.”  
  
“Mrs Hudson…” he slurred.  
  
“Yeah? What about her?” the D.I. asked carefully.  
  
“She made me soup.”  
  
“All right. What about it?”  
  
“I… I couldn’t… it made me sick. I was sick, right in front of her.”  
  
“It’s okay. It happens.”  
  
“No… tell her. I need to tell her… it wasn’t the soup. I’ve been awful to her and she’s so nice to me…” Sherlock was on the verge of tears now.  
  
“She knows you’ve been really ill.”  
  
“No, I have to… I have to apologize to her.”  
  
Lestrade pushed his hand through the matted black curls and felt the back of Sherlock’s neck. It was blazing hot. “No, not right now,” he responded firmly. “Right now, you’re going to have some water and something for your temperature, and then you’re going to have a nice sleep, and when you’re feeling up to it you can tell her.”  
  
“But—”  
  
“But nothing. Seriously, Sherlock, you need to sleep. When you wake up, I’ll make you some toast and tea, all right? Just right now, lie down.”  
  
Lestrade frowned as the dark-haired man essentially fell over. He picked up the empty glass on the bedside table and walked down the hall into the kitchen. He gave it a quick rinse and then filled it with cold water, staring at it as he swirled the water around, dumped it out, then refilled it. Three times.  
  
By the time he returned to Sherlock’s bedroom, the thin man was sound asleep again. He had hoped to get the medication into him, but there was no way he was going to wake him. It would have to wait.  
  
Greg Lestrade sat down heavily in the chair that he knew was “John’s.” With a sigh, he shut his eyes and tipped his head back.  
  
Sherlock woke up about two hours later. Lestrade wasn’t surprised that he didn’t remember that the older man was in the flat. Sherlock was. He glared at the silver-haired man, stumbling over to the sofa and collapsing onto it.  
  
“Do you want something to eat?” Lestrade asked easily, rather pointedly focusing on the telly. He had absolutely no idea what was playing. It didn’t matter. He knew that if he had just stumbled out of bed, dressing gown dragging off his shoulders, his hair a mess and with dried tears gumming up his eyelashes, thinking he was home alone, he wouldn’t have wanted to be looked at, either.  
  
“Not hungry.”  
  
All right. Lestrade deserved that. He had been warned. “Okay, I misspoke. What I meant to say is, ‘I’m going to make you something and you will eat it’.”  
  
“No.” Sherlock’s eyes flickered toward the telly, then toward the book shelves.  
  
“Ummm… yes.” Lestrade got up and strode into the kitchen. Opened the fridge. Opened the cabinets. Damn.  
  
Sherlock, enthroned on the sofa, smirked.  
  
There was basically nothing to eat in the flat. Right. He should have realized that ahead of time.  
  
“Well, I’ll just pop down to Mrs Hudson’s—”  
  
“NO!” Sherlock tried to jump up from the sofa, a look of sheer panic in his eyes. Lestrade, who had been standing at the kitchen doorway, took three quick strides across the room, his hands outstretched.  
  
He caught him.  
  
“Okay. It’s okay. Sit down. Here. That’s better. Come on, now. Deep breaths, Sherlock.” He took Sherlock’s head between his hands. He could see the panic in his eyes and feel his trembling. “Come on, now, Sherlock! Deep breath in…” he demonstrated. Sherlock, his queer, light eyes locked on his, made a great effort to imitate him. Lestrade nodded encouragingly. “And out, slow,” he added. Sherlock complied shakily. “Good job, mate. Another one in.”  
  
And for three minutes, Lestrade reminded one of the greatest minds in the country how to breathe.  
  
Finally, he felt safe releasing Sherlock’s head. He shifted his hold to the boney shoulders and eased the whip-thin man against the back of the sofa. He gently released him and took a step back.  
  
“How about some water and something for that fever, yeah?”  
  
Sherlock nodded.  
  
And Greg Lestrade went through the old but familiar actions: paracetamol and water. Cool, wet flannel with which he gently wiped Sherlock’s face. Laid him down and covered him with the afghan that was draped over John’s chair. Ran his fingers through the dark, tangled curls.  
  
“You want a shower, or a bath?” he asked.  
  
“Later.”  
  
“All right. Now, how about I nip out and get something to nibble on, yeah?”  
  
Sherlock nodded, then looked longingly at the book shelves.  
  
“You want a book before I go out?” Lestrade asked. “Which one?” He patiently searched for and found what Sherlock was after—a book about beekeeping. All right. He didn’t question it. Actually, it rather pleased him—for once the man was reading about something that did not involve murder. He put it on the coffee table, within Sherlock’s reach, and added the remote.  
  
“All right. I know what you like. Back in fifteen.” He grabbed his coat and mobile.  
  
Greg Lestrade let his expression fall in the ten seconds it took him to run down the stairs. By the time he had opened the street door, he had collected himself.  
  
*  
  
In reality, it had taken him about twenty minutes, but Lestrade had returned to 221B with a goal in mind. He was going to perform an experiment. He had purchased what was frankly some of the worst junk food he could get his hands on. Half ten on a Friday night and it had been painfully easy, to be honest. It was all high in calories, fat, and sugar or salt (some had both), all wrapped in brightly colored, cheery packets, and all of it was horrifyingly bad for anyone who actually ate it. To Sherlock, it should be irresistible. Or at least it had been. Greg was determined, though. He had a plan.  
  
He dropped all of the goodies on the coffee table, then shucked his coat. Sherlock was still lying down, but he was actually engrossed in his book.  
  
“Hey,” he said gently. “I’ve got us a right feast, mate. Everything my ex-wife said I couldn’t have.”  
  
“Which one?” Sherlock drawled, not taking his eyes from his book.  
  
Lestrade, focused on his brilliant idea, let that one roll off his shoulders. He nudged the younger man up into a sitting position (and God his blood pressure or his blood sugar must be low because damn him if he didn’t nearly pass out even though he was still seated) and sank down next to him. He grabbed the nearest packet and opened it. Sherlock locked his eyes on it. Lestrade offered the—what was it? Crisps? Didn’t even matter—to him.  
  
Sherlock’s eyes dropped down immediately.  
  
Lestrade reached into the bag. Took one crisp. Popped it into his mouth. And yeah, all right, he had to admit, it was sort of nice in a very sodium-and-fat-laden way.  
  
He tried to chew nonchalantly (that was not something they taught in police training) while Sherlock scrutinized him, frowning. He took another crisp and popped it in his mouth. Chewed. Swallowed.  
  
Casually held the packet out.  
  
He didn’t have to worry about the effects of the remainder of the crisps on his waistline.  
  
Greg Lestrade performed the same experiment several times, eventually proving his thesis. 1) Sherlock would not open any packets on his own. 2) He would not immediately eat anything from the packets, even if opened by Lestrade; he would only eat after Lestrade did. 3) He would not eat from a packet regardless of what Lestrade himself ate unless he saw the packet being opened. Therefore: he would eat if—and only if—a) a packet had been opened in front of his eyes by Lestrade and b) Lestrade himself had eaten from the packet first.  
  
The younger man’s anguished words—words he might not even remember uttering—floated through Lestrade’s head. Being forced to eat something that made him sick. Being sick in front of Mrs Hudson. Being sick from eating food that she had prepared where he couldn’t observe; food she wasn’t eating with him.  
  
Oh, God.  
  
Sherlock was equating eating with being poisoned.  
  
All right, Greg, he told himself as he popped open a bottle of Tizer and took a swig, trying not to gag on the sweetness of it. All right. It was the crappiest of crap food and he could feel his arteries hardening as he ate it, but Sherlock was actually—really—eating. At least it was calories and something in his stomach. Tomorrow would be better. He had an idea for that, too.  
  
When Sherlock had slowed down and apparently lost interest in the bean feast before him, Greg patted his knee and gathered up the empty packets. Tossed them in the kitchen bin. Went back into the sitting room. Sherlock, once again engrossed in his book, looked up angrily.  
  
“All right, now. Bath?”  
  
“I’m fine.”  
  
“No. You are not fine. You are, to be blunt, nasty.”  
  
Sherlock rolled his eyes (which secretly delighted Greg). “Fine. Shower.”  
  
“No.”  
  
“What?”  
  
“Look, I’m really, really pleased that you’ve eaten something, but you’re still far too shaky on your pins for a shower. I’m drawing you a bath.”  
  
“It’s late.”  
  
“No time like the present.” And Lestrade strode through the kitchen, down the hall to the bathroom. Yanked back the curtain. Thankfully (was it?), it was clean. Not even a bucket of squid tentacles.  
  
Sometimes Lestrade missed the tentacles.  
  
He rinsed the tub, then put the stopper in and began to fill it with warm water.  
  
There. Perfect temp. Full tub. Three clean towels and two flannels on the closed lid of the toilet. He went out into the sitting room. Sherlock had dropped his book onto the floor and slumped down over the arm of the sofa, staring at the telly. Greg glanced at the screen. Improbably, James Bond was escaping an explosion without a hair out of place.  
  
“All right, mate, time for a bath,” he said gently.  
  
“John likes James Bond,” Sherlock responded.  
  
“Yeah, he does,” Greg agreed, slipping his hands under Sherlock’s arms.  
  
“Maybe he’s watching this right now?” Sherlock’s head dropped forward, toward his chest.  
  
“Yeah, maybe he—” he pulled up, gently. “—is. Come on, Sunshine.”  
  
It had been years; not many, but enough. Greg learned the value of muscle memory, though, as his body took over. Lift up. Standing. Steadying. Turning him. Hands on waist. Guiding him down the hall (of whatever flat it was; there were so many in the early days) to the bathroom.  
  
Dressing gown was already falling off him. Easy peasy.  
  
Right. Next were the ancient t-shirt and pyjama bottoms. He noted that the shirt was on inside-out.  
  
“Come on, Sherlock. Off.” He tugged at the shirt. Sherlock moved his arms, not terribly convincingly, but there was a vague sense of cooperation.  
  
And bottoms.  
  
Greg did a remarkable job of not vomiting.  
  
John _had_ warned him. That was true. That was fair.  
  
It had not _prepared_ him.  
  
Cuts and cross cuts and parallel lines and Xs and o god Sherlock why why why your lovely perfect skin why?  
  
Steadying hands. Up. Over. Sit down.  
  
Sherlock sighed as he was enveloped by the warm water. Greg gave a small smile and picked up a clean flannel.  
  
Sherlock had been wonderful during his bath. He let Greg clean him—slowly, gently, especially over the cuts. He obediently sat forward for the cups of water over his matted hair. Moaned in pleasure at the fingers massaging shampoo and conditioner into the dark curls.  
  
“Okay, time. Up.” Sherlock grumbled at the too-soon instructions but sat upright as Greg pulled the plug. He got him standing up, over the side of the tub, and seated him on one of the towels, which he had spread over the closed toilet lid. He laid the second towel over Sherlock’s lap and began toweling the tousled head with the third one. Oh, familiar streets indeed.  
  
The shivering was violent and a bit concerning, but Greg knew the art of toweling briskly and wrapping: one towel around the waist; the other draped over his shoulders.  
  
Guiding the younger man back into his bedroom. Seating him on the bed. Yanking clean night clothes out of drawers (how did he know where to find them? It bothered him a bit how easy it was). Easing bottoms up and top down.  
  
“Come on, now.” Encouraging him to stand up long enough for the duvet to be pulled back. Sit down. Lie (fall) down. Duvet up. Comforting pat on the hip.  
  
“Good job, mate.”  
  
Light off. Door almost but not completely closed.  
  
Ten minutes. Changed into something he had swiped from Sherlock’s drawers (John’s spare clothing would never fit him). Lights off. Glance up the stairs to the extra (John’s) room, above. No. Not John’s. Not anymore.  
  
And too far away.  
  
Crap.  
  
And Greg Lestrade, Detective Inspector with Scotland Yard, slid as silently as he could into the consulting detective’s bed.  
  
And found that he couldn’t fall asleep until he had rolled over, tucking his stomach into the too-thin man’s boney back; his knees against hollows; face into the nape of the neck that was cooler than before but still too warm, and draping an arm over a nearly non-existent belly.  
  



	9. Morning

“No, John, it’s fine. I’ve put in for a coupla days off. I’m going to grab some cold cases and throw some things in a bag and stay with him for a bit.”  
  
Greg listened to his mobile, his finger in one ear to block out the traffic and crowd noise. He was on the street in front of Speedy’s.  
  
“Mrs Hudson’s got him for now. He wasn’t too bad when we got up. She came up and we made eggs and toast together.”  
  
Listening.  
  
“Yeah, all three of us. See, that’s part of it. I did a little experiment yesterday—yeah, I get the irony; all right—but listen, John. And really think about this. When does Sherlock eat these days? I mean, under what circumstances?” He waited, then nodded his head as the doctor’s voice, garbled a bit by a bad signal, confirmed what he had hypothesized.  
  
So it wasn’t his imagination. Sherlock would only eat successfully if the food offered to him was sealed and opened in front of him, prepared in his presence, or shared with someone he trusted—mainly John. His valiant effort to eat Mrs Hudson’s soup was a testament to how much he trusted her, but even then he had been unable to keep it down.  
  
“God, I hate to be right about this,” he admitted to the doctor. “So add attempted poisoning to the list?” Listening. “Yeah, makes me sick, too.” The detective inspector glanced at his watch. “Look, John, I’m going to run. I left them watching something on YouTube and I’m not sure if I’ll be coming back to origami swans or exotic dancing.”  
  
*  
  
“Exotic dancing it is,” he muttered to himself as he mounted the stairs to Flat B a while later. He could hear music. He paused and dropped his overnight bag in the hallway before entering the sitting room. Oh! It was violin music. Was Sherlock…?  
  
The light, lilting piece, which he didn’t recognize, ended, and as he opened the door he could hear a single set of hands applauding. He entered. Mrs Hudson was perched on the arm of John’s chair, clapping and beaming. Sherlock was standing near the window, facing her. He pulled the violin away from his face and lowered his bow arm. A small but warm smile played around his lips as he looked at her affectionately.  
  
“Oh, Greg!” she called out, noticing the D.I.’s entrance. “Sherlock’s composing a piece for the baby.”  
  
“That’s fantastic, Sherlock!” Lestrade responded, as always genuinely impressed with the man’s musical talent.  
  
“I understand the social convention is to present a ‘baby gift’ to acknowledge the birth.”  
  
“This is so much nicer than some bodysuits,” Mrs Hudson pointed out.  
  
“You made her…” Sherlock considered for a few seconds. “You crocheted a hat and booties and are working on a matching jumper.”  
  
Mrs Hudson laughed out loud. “You’re right,” she admitted.  
  
“Of course I am.” Oh, that glorious, arrogant, and slightly confused tone—it had been so long since Sherlock had sounded that positive about himself, Lestrade almost teared up upon hearing it.  
  
Mrs Hudson glanced at her wristwatch. “Oh, Sherlock, that casserole is nearly ready. Will you please help me with it?”  
  
Sherlock, who had carefully wiped down and put away his violin and bow, nodded. Lestrade must have looked a bit puzzled and the detective picked up on it. “Mrs Hudson has slightly injured her wrist and asked for my assistance in making some lunch.”  
  
Oh, Mrs Hudson was a genius in her own right. Obviously the success of having Sherlock in the kitchen while they had been making breakfast had not gotten past her. And their joint success in getting Sherlock to eat something—anything—both the evening before and that morning was going at least a short way toward restoring Sherlock’s energy level. He was still too pale and moving far too slowly for Lestrade’s liking, but the fact that he had had both the physical and mental energy to compose thrilled him.  
  
“Smells good,” he remarked casually, hanging up his coat. “What’s on?”  
  
“Oh, just a casserole. I had some egg noodles that needed using up,” she replied airily.  
  
Lestrade found himself holding his breath as they entered the kitchen. The kitchen table had been cleaned and scoured—”That’s how I hurt my wrist” Mrs Hudson had filled in, with the slightest dip of one eyelid to tip him off—and Sherlock had taken the bubbling hot dish out of the cooker.  
  
And then he hesitated. Stopped. His placid expression had changed to something tighter. His hands, which had been almost steady when they were on the dish, began shaking more. Greg stepped in before it got any worse.  
  
“Hey! I’ll do that. No way is Sherlock Holmes going to be more helpful than me.”  
  
Sherlock nodded and stepped back, staring dumbly at the steaming dish and stack of plates beside it.  
  
“Sit down, Sherlock,” Mrs Hudson said gently. She indicated the chair on the far side of the table, where Sherlock could observe Greg dishing out the creamy noodles. He dropped into it clumsily, his eyes never leaving the cooker. Greg positioned himself carefully so as not to obstruct Sherlock’s view. He scooped out a moderate portion of the casserole and handed it to Mrs Hudson, who had seated herself on Sherlock’s left. He scooped out a smaller portion and put that in front of Sherlock, who leaned back in his chair, away from the table. Finally, he gave himself a generous serving and sat down with it.  
  
“This looks wonderful. I don’t get enough home cooking, Mrs H.,” he commented. He picked up his fork, loaded it deliberately, and took a bite. Mrs Hudson did the same. Both of them were now pointedly looking at their plates and not at Sherlock.  
  
Sherlock’s shaky hand reached out. He took his fork. It hovered indecisively over his own plate for nearly a minute. Greg and Mrs Hudson began chatting about a new movie, pretending to ignore him. They didn’t think he’d actually notice, though. He was lost in his own world, his eyes darting between the casserole dish on the top of the cooker, their plates, and his own.  
  
Mrs Hudson nearly choked in relief when he dipped his fork into the food on his own plate and took a bite.  
  
*  
  
“It wasn’t much—not nearly as much as I’d like to see him eat, but he ate off his own plate.” Greg was back down on the street outside the café, his mobile jammed against his ear. It was midafternoon and threatening rain, but he didn’t want to talk to John with Sherlock in earshot. He had finally had a chance to get away after Sherlock had fallen asleep in his chair, a book entitled _Crime and Science_ complete with a lurid blood stain on the spine—lying forgotten on his chest. Mrs Hudson had gone downstairs after their successful meal and the washing up, and the dreariness of the afternoon had worked in his favour, lulling his companion to sleep. He reckoned he had under an hour and was determined to make the best of it. He was nodding as John responded to the news.  
  
“Yeah. Having him see the food prepared really seems to help. But I don’t think it was easy for him.”  
  
He listened.  
  
“Yeah, we’ll handle supper the same way. I’m running out now for a few things. I hate to keep bothering Mrs Hudson, so…” John said something and Greg chuckled. “Yeah. Bachelor food. Easy and fattening, but that’s what he needs.” Greg was now walking toward the shops, glancing up at the rapidly-darkening clouds. “What was that? Mmm,” he eventually said in agreement. “All right. Does he like any special brand of beans?”  
  
*  
  
It had started to rain as he was finishing up the shopping. He had picked up bread, peanut butter, strawberry jam, tins of beans, jars of sauce, and some pasta. Some soup. More eggs. More tea and coffee. Three different types of biscuits. He made sure that the packaging on everything was unblemished. He slipped back into the flat quietly and put the bags on the kitchen table. Sherlock was still sound asleep in his chair; the book had slid to the floor. Greg hung up his now-wet coat and kicked off his shoes, slipping silently across the floor. He crouched and picked up the book.  
  
And gasped in pain as Sherlock lashed out with his foot, catching him in the shin. “Get away from me!” he shouted. Crap. Sherlock’s eyes were half open and glazed over. Not really awake, then. Greg stepped back smartly to avoid another kick, clutching the book to his chest automatically.  
  
He stood still for a moment. The younger man had settled back into his chair, but he had begun coughing. Greg counted, barely daring to breath. Fifty seconds and Sherlock’s breathing began to slow down. Sixty seconds and his eyes drifted shut again.  
  
Greg took one step back and sank into John’s chair. Opened the book and began to read it, not daring to move again.  
  
*  
  
The sound of the grocery bags rustling woke him. He frowned. The room had grown a bit darker as the rain droned on. He struggled out of the far-too-comfortable chair and squinted into the light of the kitchen. Sherlock was poking into the still-unpacked bags of food. He glanced over in Lestrade’s direction.  
  
“John would have something to say about leaving the milk out,” he remarked drily, pointedly lifting the container from the bag and putting it in the fridge. He then slowly pulled everything else out and laid it on the table, thoughtfully sorting it out in some order completely unfathomable to Lestrade. What the D.I. could see was that Sherlock was checking everything; testing that everything was sealed.  
  
“How about some tea?” Greg murmured.  
  
“No thanks,” Sherlock responded. He was distracted; frowning at the food. He looked up at the cabinets.  
  
“I don’t know where anything’s supposed to go,” Greg offered, walking into the kitchen.  
  
“Neither do I,” Sherlock replied. “Except that all of John’s favorites went on the lower shelves, because ‘Honestly, Sherlock, how am I supposed to make anything if I do myself an injury just getting things down?’”  
  
Lestrade snorted and laughed and Sherlock joined in with his low chuckle.  
  
And then he started coughing.  
  
It didn’t last long, but Lestrade didn’t like the sound of it. The pale creature in front of him was clearly uncomfortable. “Did you get me cigarettes?” he finally managed to say, his voice too casual.  
  
“Yeah. Coat pocket.” Lestrade indicated his coat with a toss of his head. He pointedly aimed himself for the kettle and the sink while Sherlock went around the other side of the table in search of a nicotine fix.  
  
*  
  
“So he ate tonight. Not enough, and some came off my plate, but that’s fine. Listen, John, I’m a bit worried. He’s got a fever again, and now he’s started with this cough… No. He won’t let me take it. I’ll try when he’s asleep. I’m going to… no. That’s not necessary. You’re supposed to be taking a few days off, right? And if it’s something contagious, I don’t want you bringing it back home. I’ll be fine.”  
  
*  
  
“John? Mary? Hey. It’s Greg. I’m sorry to bother you. Is John available?” Mary explained that John was giving their daughter a bath. He smiled sadly at the image. “Can you have John ring me when he can? It’s not urgent,” he added.  
  
John called back less than five minutes later. Greg sighed in relief as his name came up on his mobile. “John? Oh, thank God. Listen, last night was crap. He’s coughing badly and his temp was thirty-eight point four when he got up. Only thing I could get into him for breakfast was coffee and paracetamol. I suggested some cough medicine and he nearly bit my head off… No, I left him poking at his laptop. Okay, yeah, I’ll try that. Talk to you later? Thanks, mate!”  
  
*  
  
“Hey, John. Thanks for meeting me.” Greg slid into the booth the doctor had claimed in the back of the pub. There was a beer and a shot of whisky already waiting for him.  
  
He took the shot and a good slug of beer before sighing and putting the mug down. He ran a hand through his silver hair and sighed deeply.  
  
“Well, that came from the gut,” John murmured, sipping at his own beer.  
  
“How the _hell_ have you managed it all these years?” the D.I. blurted out.  
  
John smiled bitterly. “It wasn’t always this bad,” he admitted, shrugging.  
  
“No, but… God. Sometimes I want to throttle him. And then I think about what you told me, and I listen to him, and…”  
  
“You want to cry,” John supplied.  
  
“Yeah. Honestly—yeah.”  
  
“I’ve been thinking about it—obviously—and, well—can we just run down things for a bit?” John licked his lips.  
  
“Sure.” Greg traced squiggles on his mug with his finger.  
  
“All right. We know that for some reason his—uh—encounter with Magnussen has for whatever reason brought up what were probably buried memories of abuse at the hands of his… Stafford Holmes.”  
  
“Something that hasn’t been triggered before,” Lestrade added. “Or at least this… erm… vividly.”  
  
“Right. And since then, specific cases and situations have triggered specific memories.” The doctor leaned forward and lowered his voice a bit. “And the memories are causing… adverse behaviors and actions.”  
  
“Understatement of the century,” Lestrade responded, clearing his throat. “Let’s see… nightmares. Drug use. Erm… those times when he’s awake but not really. Panic attacks. Anorexia. Paranoia.”  
  
“It’s impossible to tell if he’s suffering from paranoia because there really _are_ people out to get him,” John pointed out. And then the absurdity of his statement made him laugh and then choke on his beer. He leaned back, letting his head thump onto the high back of the booth seat. “Okay, that’s what’s _wrong_ with him. What about what’s _right_?”  
  
“Right? Is there anything?” Lestrade was starting to sound a bit panicky himself.  
  
“Yeah. We have to look at some of the positives.” Lestrade snorted at this but let the doctor continue. John held up one finger. “One: He might not be eating as much as we like, but we can get him to eat most of the time as long as he’s in control in some fashion.”  
  
Greg nodded.  
  
“Two: There are places that he feels safe.”  
  
Greg ticked them off: The flat. The mortuary. The non-triggering crime scenes. His parents’ home.  
  
“Three: There are some completely normal—for him—things that he will do.”  
  
Play the violin. Shout at crap telly. Read. Research. Experiments (to an extent).  
  
“Four: There are things that calm him down.”  
  
Baths. Being tucked into bed. Cuddling with the baby.  
  
They both sat back, exhausted.  
  
“So, now that we know all this?” Lestrade finally huffed out.  
  
“So… now… maybe it’s time to call in the big guns?” John ventured.  
  
“Not before we have another round.”  
  
*  
  
Lestrade crept back into 221. He could hear the coughing before he was halfway up the stairs. He sighed and dragged himself up. It had been an exhausting day. Despite their best efforts, he and Mrs Hudson had only been able to get Sherlock to eat an absolute minimum—some of her jammie dodgers, tea, some pieces of orange and banana that she had somehow gotten him to peel and slice himself, and a few spoons of oxtail soup from a can. They were fairly sure that the reason he had taken in less than the previous day wasn’t because of their approach—having him involved in the food prep really did seem to make a difference—so he wasn’t sure what was up now.  
  
After the desultory supper (Greg had made himself a cheese sandwich to supplement the soup) he had texted John and found the quiet man a documentary on murderous chimpanzees or some such nonsense to watch. Sherlock seemed exhausted enough that he wasn’t going to be moving off the sofa, and with Mrs Hudson on alert downstairs, he had managed to get out to meet John.  
  
Now he faced another long night.  
  
5.12 AM  
  
Greg groaned and grabbed his mobile, glancing at the time before he answered it. “Lestrade,” he growled, attempting to clear his throat. He listened, frowning. Damn. Damn damn damn. He sat up and kicked the covers off John’s bed. Sherlock had fallen asleep soundly enough shortly after he returned from the pub ( _Did you and John have a nice date_? Sherlock had asked obnoxiously when he entered the flat, making him laugh) that he had felt safe sleeping in the small bedroom upstairs. Now he glanced around for his clothes as he listened to the call.  
  
Threw on his clothing. Hustled downstairs in his stocking feet. Peered in at Sherlock. He was flat on his back and breathing heavily, his mouth open, but he was asleep. Oh, thank God, the D.I. thought as he grabbed his coat and his shoes and headed to the ground floor. There was a body waiting for him and his team in Hyde Park. He cringed as he texted John, fully aware of the time.  
  
*  
  
5.22 AM  
  
John groaned and grabbed his mobile, glancing at the time before he opened the new text message. “Lestrade!” he growled, attempting to clear his eyes of sleep. He read it, frowning. Damn. Damn damn damn. He sat up and kicked his covers off. He had fallen asleep soundly enough shortly after he had returned from the pub ( _Did you and Greg have a good talk?_ Mary had asked anxiously when he entered the house) and he had felt good sleeping next to her with the baby safe in her cot in the room next door. Now he glanced at his wife as he read the message.  
  
He slid out of bed and padded into the baby’s bedroom. Peered in at her. She was on her back and sleeping sounding. Oh, thank God for her, the doctor thought. What would he do without his precious daughter? He went into the kitchen. Switched on the kettle. Sat and had some coffee. Thought a bit. Making up his mind, he texted Lestrade. And then he made himself some toast, biding his time until he would wake Mary.  
  
6.52 AM  
  
Mary Watson straightened up, scooping the baby up from the changing table. She headed for the kitchen, where she knew John had her coffee waiting for her. “Good morning, my love,” she said to him, bending to kiss him as he sat at the table, reading something on his laptop.  
  
He kissed the baby and her back, smiling a bit sadly. That couldn’t be good. She bit her lip as she handed him the baby and got herself coffee. She sat at the table.  
  
“So, what happened?” she asked, taking her first sip. “Oh, that’s good,” she groaned.  
  
“Lestrade had to go into work. Body in Hyde Park.”  
  
“Crap.”  
  
“Yeah. And I’ve _got_ to work today. They were short-staffed to begin with, and now Wilson’s called in sick.” He cradled his daughter to his chest in one arm.  
  
“Can Mrs Hudson…?”  
  
“She’s wrung out. I hate to ask her to do more than she’s already doing.”  
  
“His parents?”  
  
“Out of town for a few days.”  
  
“All right.”  
  
“All right? He can’t be left alone for more than a few hours.” John raked his free hand through his hair.  
  
“We’ll go.” She nodded firmly, taking a deep pull on her coffee.  
  
“We…?” John glared at her.  
  
“The baby and I.” She rose and poked a few slices of bread in the toaster.  
  
“I can’t ask you to do that,” he protested.  
  
“You didn’t ask. I’m offering.”  
  
“Mary…”  
  
“John. It’s fine. I can handle the food thing—I know the rules. And we both know that seeing the baby calms him down.” John thought about it. She was right about him seeing the baby. But what if it didn’t work this time? What if he became violent, or ran out? Or if he was really ill? What if it was contagious? “John,” she said firmly, interrupting his train of thought. “I can handle Sherlock Holmes, and our daughter can handle a few germs. I want to help.”  
  
*  
  
Not so bad. The day had been not so bad. Mary had arrived at the flat, baby in tow, in time to encourage Sherlock to make himself some breakfast. Breakfast turned out to be a peanut butter and jelly sandwich, which was fine with her, and she happily accepted a sandwich herself. He seemed better than John had described, so maybe he was feeling better. He was delighted to see the baby--that was certain. As soon as he had eaten he had taken ahold of her, wanting to try a new game with her. Mary let him, glancing over periodically from where she was doing the washing up.  
  
Lunch had been all right; orange and banana slices, streaky bacon, and some muffins that Mrs Hudson had made with him. Mary had no objections as long as calories went in. She had also made sure that Sherlock was drinking water or juice.  
  
And then she realized that she was out of formula.  
  
“Damn,” she muttered, digging through the baby bag.  
  
“What’s wrong?” he asked. He was seated at his desk, where the baby was in her carrier, and he was dangling his long, white fingers in front of her, apparently making them dance for her. She seemed fascinated.  
  
“I thought I put more formula in here,” she muttered. “I’m going to have to go out.”  
  
“That’s fine.”  
  
“It’s going to take a while,” she frowned. “They don’t have the brand she likes down at the corner shop.”  
  
“We’re fine, Mary. I promise.”  
  
So Mary had kissed her daughter and headed out.


	10. Telling

Miss Watson was a very happy baby. She had no reason not to be. She had her Mummy and Daddy, who loved her very much, and took very good care of her. There was some other very lovely big people who took care of her, too—Nana (who Mummy and Daddy called Mrs Hudson), and Granny and Granddad (who they called Mr and Mrs Holmes).  
  
And then there was Uncle Sherlock. Mummy and Daddy just called him Sherlock and then sometimes other things that they covered her ears before saying, which made her intensely curious to hear them.  
  
Uncle Sherlock was special. He was different. Oh, he was wonderful about making her warm and clean and dry, which was one of her top three priorities (the other two being having a full tum and having a nice sleep, preferably _on_ a big person). He didn’t feed her very often and he wasn’t quite as comfortable to sleep on as Daddy was, or Mummy, or Granny, but that was all right. Because, she was learning, everyone was different.  
  
Only Mummy could cuddle her and fill up her tum in her special way. Only Daddy could blow bubbles on her belly and wash her hair without getting shampoo in her eyes. Granddad sang to her and swung her high in the air, and Nana recited rhymes, and Granny read her books and always remembered to show her all the pictures.  
  
Uncle Sherlock told her things.  
  
He was very serious about it. He would hold her close and murmur into the top of her head, or sometimes her belly. Things like:  
  
H hydrogen; He helium; Li lithium; Be beryllium…  
  
And:  
  
Onset is two to six hours after death, and starts with the eyelids, neck, and jaw. After another four to six hours, the other muscles, including the internal organs, are affected. Times are all terribly approximate and useless for some cases…  
  
And:  
  
2, 3, 5, 7, 11, 13, 17, 19, 23, 29, 31, 37, 41, 43, 47, 53…  
  
And:  
  
Lorsque j’avais six ans j’ai vu, une fois, une magnifique image, dans un livre sur la Forêt Vierge qui s’appelait “Histoires Vécues”. Ça représentait un serpent boa qui avalait un fauve. Voilà la copie du dessin.  
  
And:  
  
Now, your father will undoubtedly want you to know that the earth goes ‘round the sun or some such nonsense, and even if it doesn’t matter to you, it matters to him, so you just do your best to make him happy.  
  
His voice was very low and rumbly and it made her feel very nice inside.  
  
*  
  
 _The first time she had met him, Uncle Sherlock had been ill, and her daddy, who did something called “paying the bills” by making people well, had driven to his flat to fix him. Mummy had been doing something, so after a bit of shouting, Daddy had buckled her into her car seat and taken her along. Daddy did tend to become a bit shouty whenever Uncle Sherlock was mentioned, so she took it in stride.  
  
Daddy had swung her up onto his shoulder and let himself into the tall building. It was quite different from their quiet house, with lots more cars going past, but the inside smelled nice. Daddy went first to a door right in front of them, and knocked, smiling at her. He waited. His smile got a bit smaller. He knocked again. Now he was a frownie daddy as he tried the door.  
  
Daddy said a word that Mummy did not like him to use. Then he carried her up the stairs and through another door and into a room that did not smell nearly as nice.  
  
“Sherlock?” Daddy said.  
  
“You should speak to the teenager who keeps hitting your car, John.”  
  
“My car?” Daddy carried her through the room. A big person—bigger than Daddy—was standing at a tall window, looking out onto the busy street below them. He was wearing night-time clothes even though it was day time, like Mummy and Daddy did on something called “the weekend.” What is a weekend? she wondered.  
  
“It’s got two distinct scrapes along the front fender—clearly a bicycle. Scrapes are too high for it to belong to a child’s bike, and an adult would, presumably, not keep running into it over and over.”  
  
“Ah. Well, actually, I think I know who’s been doing that. I’ll speak to his parents.”  
  
The big person turned from the window and she got her first good look at him. Now, Miss Watson was in a bit of a monochromatic stage, and when her eyes were able to focus on the man in front of her, they opened wide. Pale, pale face; lovely dark hair--here was a big person in a color scheme she could appreciate. She stared.  
  
And the big person, his eyes opening equally widely, stared back.  
  
“You’ve brought the baby,” he mumbled. Oh, she did like his voice, too.  
  
“Mary’s busy and apparently Mrs Hudson is out, so, yeah. Are you all right?”  
  
“I’m fine, John. Why are you here?” He sounded cross with Daddy.  
  
“Mycroft got in touch with me—”  
  
“Kidnapped you.”  
  
“Fine. Yes. Kidnapped me on my way home yesterday to say that he was concerned about you. Come on, come sit down.” Daddy walked over to a low, squishy-looking chair and sank into it, settling her on his lap so she could continue to stare at the man--Sherlock.  
  
Sherlock dropped into another chair so he and Daddy could have what Mummy called a “face-to-face.” Neither one of them seemed very happy about it. She didn’t like that. She let out a small whimper.  
  
“What’s the matter, my precious girl?” Daddy had whispered to her. She wriggled.  
  
Sherlock looked like she felt sometimes when she got a bottle instead of Mummy. If Daddy’s job was to make people feel better, he'd better be getting on with it. She presumed a nice burp would help, and demonstrated .“Very nice,” Daddy commented. “Now, I know you’ve told me you’re fine, but for some reason your brother and now I don’t believe you. Can you tell me why?”  
  
Sherlock frowned. “Just bored,” he finally rumbled. “Mycroft’s last case was dull, and Lestrade won’t answer my texts. Neither will Molly.”  
  
“Well, I’m not entirely surprised about that. But you…” Daddy leaned forward. “You’re… are you?”  
  
“I’m not on anything_ right now, _thank you, Doctor Watson.”  
  
“All right. I believe you. _Right now. _So how about we do something, then?”_  
  
“No.”  
  
“How about a nice walk in the park? You can deduce all the runners’ sex lives.”  
  
Sherlock considered this for a moment. Then he looked directly at her.  
  
“I’ve got a pushchair in the car,” Daddy offered. “Or… or you could hold her.”  
  
And that was how she had come to know the wonderful feel of Uncle Sherlock’s low voice rumbling through her and his dark scratchy coat and how he smelled of peppermint and smoke and she listened, listened, listened as he whispered all sorts of things to her that afternoon and many times after.  
  
*  
  
And:  
  
“Grownups are very confusing. They say you shouldn’t ever lie, but they’re actually lying when they say that. I don’t know why. I’ll ask one.”  
  
And:  
  
“Don’t worry. Your vision will improve. And you will just love colors. I promise. Wait until you see the different colors of blood as it dries.”  
  
And:  
  
“Based on genetics, you will be rather small, but very, very smart, and a crack shot, with nerves of absolute steel. In fact, you might practice a bit of that now. There’s actually no reason to cry when you’re hungry or wet. A quiet whimper and someone will be right with you. You’re very lucky that way.”  
  
And:  
  
“Well, Miss Watson, I must speak to your mum about your nappies. I’ve done some research and this brand is not universally rated well. I am aware that it is readily available and therefore sells well, but it’s certainly not a surprise to her that she needs to purchase these things, so she shouldn’t be dependent on what’s at the corner shop, hmmm? Really, she should order something higher quality in bulk online. It’s less expensive in the long run and comes right to the house. What? Oh, I should just order for her? Excellent suggestion. Let’s do that.”  
  
And his long fingers flew over the keys of his laptop. He eyed the baby shrewdly, calculating her weight, rate of increase, the size of her parents (who were both practically pocket-sized, he had confided to her affectionately), and the probability of her outgrowing too large a supply.  
  
He placed a smaller order for the flat as well.  
  
And:  
  


> Icalculatedthespeedatwhichshecouldhavewalkedbasedonthelengthofherlegstheterrainandtheconditionsbutitwasyourfatherwhoisbrilliantinhisownwayanddon’tletanyoneelsetellyouotherwisebecauseIhadtakentheheightofherheelsintoaccountbutnottheactualstyleoftheshoeandhermurdererherboyfrienddon’tgetinvolvedinthoseormaybedoIsupposeIcouldadviseyouonthatbecauseeventhoughyourfatherIsNotGayIambutifyouendupbeinggayyourdadwillloveyouanywayhelovesyourAuntHarryandmeandit’sallfineohanditwasthatshehadnoblistersaftersupposedlywalkingtwomilesinstrappysandalshighlyunlikelyherfeetweresosoftfreshpedicureyourfeetareverysoftnowandverysweetandjustignoreallthatnonsensewhenpeoplepretendtoeatyourtoesbecauseactualcannibalismisfortunatelyrarebutafascinatingculturaltaboothatactuallyhasamedicalbasisasmanyofthemsuchasincestdoesbutshedidn’thaveblistersbecauseshehadn’twalkedhomewhichchangedthetimelinesignificantlywhichnegatedthemurderer/boyfriend’salibiandifyoueverneedanalibiLestrade’syourmanordoyoucallhimUncleGeorgeorGavinorwhateverhisnameisand—

Oh. Mary.

No. I’m not. I’m fine.

No, Mary. No. Don’t take her away. I’m being safe. With her. I promise.

Come back. Please.

*

“Oh, my love, please stop crying,” Mummy crooned from the front seat of the car. But she would have none of it. She was cross with Mummy for taking her away from Uncle Sherlock. She had liked whatever sounds he made with that odd thing—a violin, he called it—nothing like that at home. She had liked watching him from her comfortable seat on the desk (she had also enjoyed watching him clear off the desk—apparently “tidying” desks involved simply shoving everything onto the floor with one sweep of a long arm). He walked around the cozy room and watched her and looked at his violin and waved a stick over it and whatever he was doing made her feel very floaty and lovely and eventually sleepy…

And it was only a wet nappy that woke her, and she let him know, and being Uncle Sherlock he was very clever about it all and soon she was dry and warm again, this time on the sofa with him. His hands were not like Daddy’s, she noticed. Daddy’s hands were small and strong and secure and still, even when she was wet and wriggly in her bath and he laughed when she tried to swim away from him like that and he held her firmly and safely so she could practice being a mermaid.

No, Uncle Sherlock’s hands were very different. They had long, white fingers, and it made her laugh when he made them dance in front of her eyes. They were strong when he swept her up and laid her down for a change. They were gentle when he counted her fingers and her toes and tapped her nose and ears and chin and told her that those were _her_ nose and ears and chin.

But sometimes they shook and when they did, he would put her down and not make his fingers dance and not try to change her. And he would look sad when that happened. And sometimes, like now, Uncle Sherlock would just bury his face in her belly or at the nape of her neck or the top of her head and breathe her in. And sometimes the front of her sleep suit or the top of her head would feel wet, and she wondered if he needed feeding or changing or just a cuddle, because that’s what she needed when she cried.

And so now she cried because Uncle Sherlock’s hands had been shaking and he had looked sad while he played with her on the sofa and he must have needed a cuddle but when Mummy came in she was very, very cross with Uncle Sherlock and had plunked her into her carrier so hard it had startled her and so she had cried, and reached out her own small hands to him as she was carried out of the room, downstairs and away.

*

Because there was the… other stuff. Stuff. Horrid word. So imprecise. Even “drugs” wasn’t quite the right word. Certainly not “recreational,” that was certain. There was nothing recreational about what he was taking. In fact, it was the opposite. It was completely serious. Deadly serious.

Even though he was fine. He told everyone that. Insisted on it. He told Molly. He told Mrs Hudson. He told his parents. He told Mary. He told Lestrade. He told the baby (when he wasn’t relating the history of forensic science to her). He didn’t bother saying anything to Mycroft, of course. But most importantly, he told John.

He wasn’t an addict. He could stop any time he wanted to.

He believed this.

He did.

He just chose not to stop at that moment.

Because there were missing bits. There had been missing bits—for years. But for some reason, now those bits were being filled in. And he didn’t like what the filling was.

He hated not being able to focus. Even with the coke, which had helped in the past, he found his attention wandering.

He loathed the distractions—which included his parents, Mrs Hudson, and Mycroft. They kept poking in at odd, unfortunate times, blathering on about irrelevant, dull subjects, like washing up and fresh food and sleeping at night and not playing his violin at three o’clock in the morning.

He despised the shaking, although he didn’t really care--except in a very distant way-- _why_ his hands shook all the time now. If it had become relevant to a case, he might have. Otherwise he had a vague sense that it had to do with withdrawal, or possibly low blood sugar, or possibly a side effect of one of the many, many pills he now popped without even asking what they were. He just hated that he couldn’t control his hands properly. So he stopped doing experiments that required that level of precision and kept them shoved in the pockets of his Belstaff when he was out.

And he abhorred the nightmares. Waking up confused and sweating, tangled in his duvet. It took him a while to figure out why his throat hurt, but it would. Apparently, he would scream and shout in his sleep. He didn’t actually figure it out. John told him. He never remembered any of it—not the actual nightmares. Just the waking up, terrified and sometimes crying.

It wasn’t all bad, though. He was, after all, back in London. He was working—or he had been. Things had slowed down a bit, but he was sure they’d pick up again. He argued with Mycroft and disagreed with Lestrade and hated Anderson and smiled at Angelo and rolled his eyes at Mrs Hudson and pouted at Mary. That was all fine.

And he had John. It wasn’t quite the same, of course—he didn’t like to think about that. So he didn’t.

And now he had the baby. He was fascinated by her. He simply couldn’t get enough. He wanted to watch her every movement. He researched her development and purchased stimulating toys. He played her Bach and Beethoven and Vivaldi and especially Mozart. And he talked to her—endlessly.

So when Mary came in from shopping that afternoon and caught him by surprise, his stomach had dropped. He had been aware that he had crossed a line, but he had—in his opinion, anyway—been as safe as possible about it. The baby was in her carrier squarely in the middle of the desk. He had cleared space all around her and there was absolutely no way she could tip over and off it, or reach anything dangerous. He had played her some lovely, quiet music, and she had dozed off. He hadn’t taken out the syringe until he was sure she was asleep.

And he felt fine. He felt marvelous, in fact, especially after the second hit, when the first one began to wear off, and that was when she woke up and he had changed her and held her safely on the sofa with him, and he had given her one of her new toys, and he had just talked to her.

That was all. He tried explaining that to Mary, but she had gone all ninja mum on him, moving so quickly that he couldn’t react. Before he could explain coherently, she had snatched the baby from his arms, plunked her into her carrier so hard she began to cry, grabbed her bag, and stormed out of the flat.

As Sherlock came down the second time that afternoon, at first he had cried. And then, wiping his face with broad strokes of his shaking hands, he had gathered up what he could find in the flat and sat on the sofa and he didn’t remember the entire rest of that day, or the night, and in the morning he wasn’t even entirely cognizant of the fact that he had been sick on the bathroom floor at some point.

Somehow by mid-morning he managed to shower, dress, and leave the flat.


	11. Big Brother

Martha Hudson was a patient woman. Everyone said so—Mrs Turner; Mrs Turner’s married ones. Mr Chatterjee. Her ex-husband ( _Being as he was dead, does that make him an ex-ex?_ she often giggled at her own joke). That handsome Detective Inspector. Mary. John. Especially John. She supposed she was. She listened to Mrs Turner’s endless chattering about her children and grandchildren. She let people go ahead of her in queues. She never looked online for spoilers about her favorite programmes (well, except for _Downton Abbey,_ but that was different. After last season she refused to watch every episode just to be outraged at the end).  
  
The biggest tell was, of course (and anyone who lived on Baker Street, or shopped there, or drove a cab through), Sherlock. Why she hadn’t tossed him right to the street after the first (minor, in his words) explosion was somewhat unfathomable—to everyone else.  
  
She honestly didn’t think she was that patient. If she was, she thought that her motto--live and let live—had a lot to do with it. And that was all she asked of others.  
  
Because despite _appearances_ —a slippery word and more slippery idea—Mrs Hudson was not exactly everyone’s ideal neighbor, or babysitter, or granny. And for those who knew it, and didn’t judge her, and—well, let her live her life the way she chose—she had a deep appreciation.  
  
So she wasn’t perfect. Oh, she baked biscuits and kept a tidy flat; she fussed about flowers in church and cooed over babies. She enjoyed her bridge club and her book club and her daytime programmes and the nighttime ones as well. She paid her taxes and donated to charity and tut-tutted over runaway children in shelters. All the right things.  
  
But Martha Hudson was not perfect. Not inside. Oh, it went beyond her herbal soothers (and she really did have a bad hip and Sherlock was the only one living who knew why), which had become somewhat of a joke. Mrs Turner liked a soother just as much as she did, to be honest. And then some lovely biscuits.  
  
And it went beyond the fact that her ex-husband had (ostensibly) run a drug cartel.  
  
Oh, Florida. What a lovely time that had been, even if she couldn’t for the life of her figure out how people lived there before air conditioning. America in general had been fabulous. She might live in the most cosmopolitan city on the planet, but it was also one of the stuffiest, most saturated in custom and history and _expectation_ , that existed. Oh, certainly—nurture the development of completely new forms of music, but still like a good sing-song on a Saturday. Launch the fashion design careers of dozens of people, but please let’s stick to our tweeds. Labour riots that changed the world and the changing of the guard—which never changed. Irony. She lived in an ironic city.  
  
America was so young. Two hundred and something years? Phppth. Nothing. Drop in the bucket. The entire country reminded her of a twenty-one-year-old. No. Twenty-two. So very, very young. So very, very confident. So very, very naïve. Everything was exciting and loud and fattening and lovely. And she had just—rolled with it. The marriage. The move. The fact that her husband not only liked her dancing but encouraged it. That it wasn’t always just—dancing. That once or twice, many years ago, someone had had one of those clever super-8 cameras.  
  
And apparently people who were clever with technology could do something called “converting” film to digital something-or-other. And for some reason, someone had decided that her dancing was worth that effort. She took it as a compliment.  
  
And so now, at her age (which she actually didn’t care if anyone knew but social convention told her she was supposed to lie about), Martha (who had been called “Marty” back then—which she loved) was just fine with pretty much anything. Pretty much anyone. But especially a young man with ivory skin and black curls; with eyes that made you think of star systems and a voice that made you think of black holes lined in velvet.  
  
Oh, he was rude. So very rude. And more than once, she had snapped at him for the rudeness, which seemed to her for the most part unnecessary.  
  
Because he was worth it. Not just because he had driven the last nail into her ex-husband’s coffin (well, most of the nails, to be honest—he was a slippery bastard). There was something about him. Something very, very “live and let live” that made them kindred spirits.  
  
And all right, yes, she did not have any children, and he had become something of a son to her. Grandson. Nephew. Didn’t matter.  
  
And yes, she worried about him—constantly.  
  
And wasn’t it queer that the former tenant of flat B had taken ill so suddenly. And died. Just when Sherlock had been chucked out of (yet another flat on) Montague.  
  
Because Sherlock never judged. Oddly. Well, almost never. Crimes of passion or revenge between adults? He couldn’t care less. People got what they deserved. All he cared about was the puzzle.  
  
It was the other cases. Kidnapping. Child abuse. Those—bothered him. Clearly.  
  
Mrs Hudson remembered, quite vividly, an early case. One of the first that Sherlock had worked with D.I. Lestrade (who was—what—a constable at the time? No, that wasn’t right. Sergeant. That was it.). He was living in a tip on Montague Street. She was aware that most of the time he was—what was the phrase?—high. Strung out. Wasted. But this case had bothered him. Disturbed him. Upset him.  
  
Not that he had said as much. No, not Sherlock. He never did. He never claimed any of his feelings. Not fear or disappointment or anger. Not even the good ones like happiness or satisfaction or even hunger.  
  
But the upsetting cases tended to lead to the need for her to be even more patient than usual. Firm. Strict, even. Shouting. And then a bin and a bath and rubbing too-thin shoulders through an old shirt of her husband’s (her ex-ex, she reminded herself).  
  
And now? It was pretty much the same, to be honest.  
  
She had had great hopes for John.  
  
“John?”  
  
“Mrs Hudson?” John sounded stressed and exhausted and more than a little annoyed.  
  
“I’m so sorry to bother you, dear…”  
  
“What’s he done this time?” John demanded, his voice flat. And with an undercurrent of something she couldn’t quite put her finger on; not over the phone, anyway.  
  
“John, dear. I know what happened yesterday with Mary and the baby. I was here when she picked her up.”  
  
“And?” Anger.  
  
She took a deep breath, not wanting to push the man any further but not knowing what else to do. “He went out on his own a little while ago.”  
  
“I can’t do anything about that, apparently,” John seethed.  
  
“John! He could barely walk. And I went up to check on things…” And her voice broke. She had been trying so very hard, but she couldn’t help it.  
  
“What?” John’s voice was suddenly softer.  
  
“He… oh, John. There were needles and all _sorts_ of things all over the place. I don’t even know what half of them are. Fridge left wide open. Broken dishes on the kitchen floor. And…”  
  
“I’m so sorry you had to see that. What—” and John’s voice broke a bit, too. He swallowed hard and tried again. “What else?”  
  
“The bathroom. It… oh, John, there was blood everywhere, and he’d been sick on the floor, and his clothing was just dumped in the tub, soaking wet. It was dreadful.”  
  
“Oh. Oh, Mrs Hudson. I am so sorry. I am so very sorry you had to see all that. You didn’t try cleaning anything, did you?”  
  
“No. No. Not this time. I couldn’t. And I didn’t know about all the… all the drugs. How to dispose of the needles and all that. I can’t just put that in my bins.”  
  
“No. No, you were exactly right to not even try. Don’t touch anything. I’ll get over there, or Greg. I’m actually working right now. When did he leave?”  
  
“About… erm… an hour ago? No, longer. I didn’t go straight upstairs.”  
  
“All right. If he comes back before I get there, don’t say anything.”  
  
“Won’t he know I’ve been up there? He always knows.”  
  
“He’s so out of it I’d be surprised if he realized that he’d been out, let alone that you’d been in. Just—unless he needs an ambulance or something—stay out of his way for now. I’ll figure something out as soon as I can.”  
  
“Oh, thank you so much. I’m so frightened for him.”  
  
“I am too, Mrs Hudson. I’ll ring you when someone’s on their way, all right? Oh, I’ve got another call coming in.” He glanced at the display. “Oh. It’s Greg—Lestrade. This can’t be good. I’ll ring back as soon as I can.”  
  
*  
  
Mrs Hudson delicately touched her “end call” button. Why was it called a button when it was just an image on a tiny screen? She marveled at this and other technology. She was a tiny bit afraid of some of it, but most of it certainly enhanced her life. She liked having CDs and DVDs of her favorite music and movies, and had quite a nice collection. She enjoyed reading John’s blogs online, and commenting on them. She adored YouTube.  
  
She appreciated mobile phones most of all, she thought—especially the new ones. She had been fairly adept with her earliest one, which could only make calls. Now she had a—what was it called? Touch something? She thought about Sherlock teaching her how to send a text. Never a patient man (the only association between Sherlock and the word “patient” generally involved A & E), he had nonetheless shown her how to call up a contact, send a message, and reply to one. Then he had entered her short list of contacts, smiling affectionately at her as she poured him tea and set out a plate of his favorite biscuits.  
  
“Now I’ll know you’re safe,” he had murmured around a lovely big bite of shortbread.  
  
“Close your mouth when you chew, dear,” she had responded, patting him on the shoulder.  
  
Oh, when Sherlock was all right, he was just lovely. He’d play his violin for her, and eat proper dinners, and sometimes they would walk to the park and sit on a bench and he’d deduce all the people going past—with an emphasis on scandalous and naughty behaviour--until she was just in fits of giggles and he was chuckling in that lovely, deep way of his.  
  
But now she dabbed her eyes and nose with a crumbled tissue. She was still shaken by what she had found in flat B. And she hadn’t even told John the worst of it, but she had taken the bits of the photo of Sherlock and John that she had found strewn all over the stairs and now carefully began to put them back together again, sliding each piece across her immaculate kitchen table with one shaking finger until the image was whole again.  
  
*  
  
“John? It’s Greg.”  
  
“What’s he done now?”  
  
After five minutes of listening, John hit his “end call” button, threw his mobile viciously down onto his desk, and shouted abuse at it for two minutes before he realized that he was at work, the door to his office was open, and the surgery waiting room was just a few feet away. Bit Not Good, he muttered to himself, slumping into his chair and wiping his hand down his face, his eyes tightly shut.  
  
When he opened them, the alarmed face of the reception nurse who was covering for Mary was peering around the door.  
  
“I am so sorry,” he blurted out. “Sorry… just… oh.”  
  
“It’s all right. It’s pretty empty in here. I was just going to suggest that you could probably wrap things up for today. Dr Agarwal can handle the rest.”  
  
“Uh…thank you?”  
  
She stepped all the way into the room and closed the door behind her.  
  
“It’s about Sherlock Holmes, isn’t it?” She indicated the offending mobile with a tip of her head. “Mary filled me in on some things,” she added shyly.  
  
John nodded.  
  
“It’s so sad. And frightening. Listen. I had a brother who got into drugs. He was in his twenties and lost his position and got his girlfriend pregnant and did some other stupid things, and then he started taking Ecstasy, and then—then heroin. He was in so much pain, and he was just trying to drown it out, I suppose. But it just made it worse, of course.”  
  
John sat very still, listening.  
  
“I’ve always been a fan of Mr Holmes, and you,” she went on. “From early on, I found your blog, and… well, I hate to admit it, but I became a bit of a fangirl. Not one of the crazy ones! I didn’t wear the hat or anything.”  
  
Despite himself, John smiled a bit.  
  
“Anyway, working here with you has been sort of a thrill, you know? You dashing off to solve crimes with him. So when—so when Mary told me what was going on—in strictest confidence, mind you—I just kept thinking of my brother.”  
  
“What happened to him?” John did not want to ask. He hadn’t planned on asking. But there he was, hearing his own voice—asking.  
  
She just shook her head, her dark eyes infinitely sad.  
  
And that was why he hadn’t wanted to ask. And now he wanted to shout. To scream. To weep.  
  
“Thank you,” he said instead. “Yeah. I’ve got to—I’ve got to go. He’s apparently caused a bit of a scene.”  
  
“I’ll shut things down in here for you when I leave,” she offered, a wan smile on her face.  
  
He grabbed his mobile, his jacket, and his medical bag, and ran out.  
  
*  
  
John quite enjoyed it. He strode up to a CCTV camera—the one nearest the surgery—dropped his bag and flipped both middle fingers at it rather vigorously. “Talk—now,” he mouthed.  
  
He yanked his mobile out of his pocket. A few stabs and a short conversation. Ended that call. A few more stabs and Mary was on the other end of the line. “I’ll probably be late,” he practically shouted at her.  
  
“What?” she responded grimly. She didn’t have to ask why or who. Not after the day before.  
  
“Lestrade phoned. There was another ‘incident’ at a crime scene.”  
  
“But… he’s been banned, for now…” she stammered, confused.  
  
“Yes, well, after practically destroying the flat overnight, he somehow showed up at one anyway, incoherent, nearly got into a fist fight with Donovan, and then just took off.”  
  
“Did he…?”  
  
“Solve it? Yeah, of course. And Lestrade’s offered to go looking for him this time, but he’s got a head start now and he’s been avoiding most of his usual spots lately anyway…” John’s voice, which had started out so strident, petered out in frustration.  
  
“Checking bolt holes?” she asked grimly. This path was so familiar they walked it blindfolded these days.  
  
“Yeah. I’ve got Billy on that.” John’s voice was sounding rougher than it had a moment earlier. “And Mrs Hudson will let me know if he goes back to the flat.”  
  
“So what are you going to do?” The silence frightened her. “John?” she finally, tentatively whispered.  
  
“I didn’t have a choice. I had to contact him.”  
  
“Oh, no. John…”  
  
“I know. I know. But I need to find him, and it’s the fastest way. And—oh, bloody hell, Mary. I can’t do this any longer. _He_ can’t do this any longer. I’ve got to figure out what the fuck is going on in that brilliant head of his before he tears himself to shreds.” The black car pulled up silently to the kerb. “I’ve got to go now. I’ll ring later. I promise.”  
  
And John Watson, ex-army solider, squared his shoulders and marched resolutely over to Mycroft’s car.  
  
*  
  
“I must say, doctor, I am a bit disappointed. I thought if that nice detective inspector couldn’t keep him under control, you certainly could.”  
  
“That’s not fair,” John replied through gritted teeth. He was in no mood for Mycroft’s games.  
  
“No, I suppose not,” Mycroft agreed.  
  
Why was it that when Mycroft agreed, it still sounded like he was disagreeing? John wondered. He wanted to ask Sherlock that, just to hear his snort of derision and smart-arse retort.  
  
He just wanted to hear Sherlock say anything, really.  
  
He bit his lip and took a deep breath. “Look,” he snapped, his hands clenching into fists at his sides, “you have the entire bloody city under surveillance. I’ve got people out looking for him all over. No sign. I need you—no, Sherlock needs you—to find him. And then I need to you to tell me a few things.”  
  
And then John smiled.  
  
John had an amazingly expressive face. Not a glimmer of anything passed through his head that wasn’t mirrored in his eyes; his mouth. And even though Sherlock alternated between groaning over it and mocking it, John knew the truth: it was one of his secret weapons. Because expressions had an impact on people. It was human nature. From birth, infants responded to the expressions of the people around them. Knowing that another person was happy, or angry, or grieving was, for almost everyone, instinctive.  
  
In fact, not being able to detect the emotions of others was so rare and, to be honest, _crippling_ that it was actually considered a disorder—a defect.  
  
So when John smiled at his friend’s elder brother, it was a deadly thing. A thing that tightened up his lips; raised their corners.  
  
And did not reach his eyes.  
  
And although Mycroft more often than not ignored those expressions and the emotions behind them, he was not incapable of interpreting them. On the contrary, he was quite brilliant at it. John would never play poker with the man.  
  
This wasn’t poker. This was a different game.  
  
“You will set your minions to searching for your brother, and then you and I are going to have a long chat. Understood?”  
  
Because it was now John’s game.  
  
Mycroft sighed. His hand moved under his desk, and seconds later, Anthea appeared. As always, she gripped her mobile, but for once she was looking at them and not at it.  
  
“My brother,” Mycroft drawled. If anyone who didn’t know him well had heard him, they would have discerned boredom, even embarrassment, in his voice.  
  
John knew better. Anthea did, too. She nodded once and left them alone.  
  
“There. Minions—as you express it so colourfully—dispersed. Now, what would you like to talk about, doctor?”  
  
“Enough.”  
  
“Enough?”  
  
“Enough of the smarmy crap. Enough of being ‘the British Government’ (the sarcasm was so strong as to be almost visible). This is about your _brother,_ and your parents, and how they’ll react when he O.D.’s or jumps off a bloody roof for real.”  
  
Mycroft had the decency to remain silent for a few seconds. “All right, then,” he said, finally, clearing his throat.  
  
“All right, then,” John echoed, firmly. He sat down, but his body remained rigid; at attention. “You will tell me what happened between Sherlock and your father (and yes, Mycroft, I know now; your mother explained it to me), and you will be _explicit._ Because I need to know. Because Sherlock needs me to know.”  
  
Mycroft sighed tightly. John could see the battle going on inside the man.  
  
“Please,” he said, finally. “I need to save my best friend from himself. Please.”  
  
And Mycroft Holmes finally relented. His face and rigid posture collapsed as he slumped forward, leaning his head into his hands. “Well, since he’s dead, I suppose it can’t do any harm.”  
  
“And yet it’s amazing how much harm a dead man can do,” John responded harshly. “Tell me.”  
  
“Tell you?”  
  
“Tell me what the hell Stafford Holmes did to my best friend that no one seemed to be able to stop, but that still haunts him. Before it kills him.”  
  
And John sat bolt upright in his chair, and waited.  
  
“I am sorry I didn’t try harder to stop it,” Mycroft sighed, taking John by surprise. “I didn’t try to help my mother, either. And that was wrong. I know that now. But back then I was working so hard at not letting it pull me down. And I do regret that.”  
  
“Have you told your mother this?” John pushed, not willing to forgive the man that easily.  
  
“In a way, yes, but no, not enough.” And for the first time since John had known him, Mycroft let the mask slip in front of him. He might have felt a bit of sympathy for him.  
  
“Then you should,” John shot out instead.  
  
“Yes, I should. And I will. But you want to know _why now_ —why what happened with Magnussen triggered this, when everything he went through in the years he was… away… and before, did not.”  
  
John just looked at him, steadily.  
  
“How much did my mother tell you?”  
  
John related, briefly, how far Mrs Holmes had taken her story.  
  
Mycroft nodded sadly when he was done. “Yes. It’s all true,” he finally sighed. He sat silently for a moment, his eyes shut. Then they snapped open and glared at the doctor in front of him.  
  
“You already know that my father is dead.”  
  
“Yes.”  
  
“Do you know how he died?”  
  
“No. Why don’t you tell me?” And then John thought about it and his stomach did an unpleasant flip.  
  
“Stafford Holmes shot himself in the head.” _Oh, thank God,_ John thought. Mycroft’s piercing gaze raked over him. “You thought that Sherlock killed him, didn’t you?”  
  
“Well, yes.”  
  
“And that was why killing Magnussen the way he did triggered all this.”  
  
“Yes. But apparently there’s more to the story. So please just tell me.”  
  
Mycroft sighed and sat back in his luxurious leather chair.  
  
“My father shot himself in front of Sherlock.”  
  
“What?!” John wanted to throw himself across the enormous mahogany desk and throttle the man.  
  
“Sherlock had gone to the house to pick up a few things. He wasn’t living there any more—he was 21 and busy being thrown out of school, most of the time—and he mistimed his visit. He hadn’t meant to be there when my father was, but there he was.”  
  
“They argued.”  
  
“Of course they argued. By then Stafford wasn’t abusing Sherlock physically any longer—he had gotten too strong for him—but that certainly didn’t stop the… other things. And one thing led to another. And my… Stafford grabbed his gun. Pointed it at Sherlock first, and then at his own head.”  
  
“My God.”  
  
“And Sherlock just—instinctively, I suppose—grabbed it. Tried to stop him. And the gun went off.”  
  
John shut his eyes for a second, but the image of a younger Sherlock struggling with the man who professed to be his father made him open them again. He thought about what Mycroft had said. He frowned. “Wait. Sherlock grabbed the gun. And then it went off?”  
  
“Yes, John.”  
  
“So…”  
  
“Do keep up,” Mycroft drawled, suddenly sounding very tired. “Yes. Sherlock was arrested for the murder of Stafford Holmes.”  
  
“But the charges didn’t stick.”  
  
“No. It was a close thing, though. There was only Sherlock’s word against all the evidence—the powder on his hands, the angle—well, he was holding the gun when it went off, but he had not pulled the trigger.”  
  
“How did he… he did it himself, didn’t he? Somehow proved that he hadn’t been the one to pull the trigger? That his story was true?”  
  
Mycroft simply nodded.  
  
And in John’s mind, he was suddenly back on that terrace behind Appledore, the wind from the helicopter in his face. He thought about the way Sherlock had looked. He thought about him pulling the trigger.  
  
“Mycroft…” he whispered. The imposing man was silent but attentive. “Did… really. I mean… did Sherlock…”  
  
“No. He did not kill Stafford, but I am certain that he wanted to. I even think that he might have, eventually, but ‘fortune’ for lack of a better word in the form of pancreatic cancer intervened. Stafford had been diagnosed the week before, you see, and he knew that he was dying. He knew that Sherlock would be coming to get his things at some point. And he knew that they would argue. He planned it. That was Stafford’s last laugh. His last act of cruelty on the boy that everyone thought was his son.”  
  
“Why didn’t he tell us? We’ve been trying to figure out what’s been going on with him for months.”  
  
“I suspect that he doesn’t remember.”  
  
“Wait. You mean… You mean that he… deleted it?”  
  
“To be honest, yes. He was not exactly… coherent… for a great deal of time following the incident. Months, to be honest. He’d disappear for days and show up, filthy, starving, coming down from whatever he had in his system. Or I’d get a call from a hospital, or the police, to come get him.” Mycroft paused and shut his eyes briefly, his mouth tight. He took a deep breath and opened them again. “I don’t think that he remembers any of it. Not the abuse, the shooting, what happened after. Any of it. And I’ve never brought it up. Nor have his parents. I suppose that nice Detective Inspector could get the court records if he knew to look for them…”  
  
“Lestrade. Greg Lestrade,” John mumbled automatically.  
  
“So I suppose what happened with Magnussen somehow triggered buried memories, or some such. And I don’t know what to do about it,” Mycroft added. And despite his tone, which was aiming for efficient, business-like—British Government—John sensed the anguish behind the man’s last sentence.  
  
John’s mind replayed the scene. Magnussen flicking his face. Sherlock’s admonishment to be stoic; to let him. The nauseating, vicious condescension of the publisher. And that final, haunted look as Sherlock made up his mind. And pulled the trigger.  
  
“I have to go,” John blurted out, standing up so quickly his chair nearly tipped over. Mycroft, not looking even slightly surprised, nodded.  
  
“Take care of my little brother, doctor,” he called to the retreating figure. The door slammed.  
  
*  
  
Mycroft was alone. He slumped forward, dropping his head into his hands. “Put him back together for me. All the king’s horses and all the king’s men…”  
  
Mycroft Holmes wept.  
  



	12. Patience

“Where?” John’s heart was beating so hard he was convinced it was visible even through his jacket. He was striding down the street, rounding the corner onto Baker Street.  
  
“St. Mary’s Wharf A & E.” Greg’s own voice sounded strained; breathless.  
  
“How bad?”  
  
“Not too bad. He apparently fell and hit his head on a railing. Nasty cut is all. He had my I.D. in his pocket, so they called me. I’ll stay with him while he gets stitched up and then bring him home, yeah?”  
  
“Yeah. That would be great. I’m going to the flat now to clean it up.” John had already talked to Greg about what he was going to be cleaning up, and that he would be taking care of the disposal as quietly as possible via the surgery.  
  
“Oh, and Greg—”  
  
“Yeah?”  
  
“Make sure he doesn’t talk, or they’ll admit him for sure.”  
  
“Already taken care of,” the Detective Inspector responded. He had been down this route more times than he cared to count.  
  
“Thanks, mate. See you soon.”  
  
Oh, thank God it wasn’t an overdose.  
  
Not that this was much better. Head injury on top of withdrawal on top of starvation. He brought Mrs Hudson up on his contact list.  
  
“John?” She sounded awful.  
  
“He’s been found. He’s all right. Well, all right enough. I’m on my way to clean the flat and Greg will bring him home in a bit.”  
  
“Oh, thank goodness! Thank you so much. I was so worried.”  
  
“I’ll be there in a tick.”  
  
“All right.”  
  
They rang off.  
  
*  
  
The cleaning of the flat was something that John never wanted to think about again. Mrs Hudson had offered and he had allowed her to help, but only in the rooms he had already deemed somewhat safe. The bedroom was the easiest. It was fairly obvious that Sherlock hadn’t been sleeping in the bed much. She changed the linens and bundled them, all the clothing from there and the bathroom, and the towels into the laundry.  
  
He had protested her helping with the rest of the bathroom, sending her instead into the kitchen. Since Sherlock hadn’t been eating or doing any experiments, it was, ironically, cleaner and safer than usual. The broken dishes turned out to be, in her estimate, two dinner plates, one mug, and two glasses.  
  
“No actual food or anything on them,” she murmured sadly as she tossed the bits. She poked at the fridge. Once again, it was nearly empty and not that messy. She had never in a million years thought she would miss the messes. Or the thumbs.  
  
John emerged from the bathroom, tying off a bin bag with a grimace on his face. He was wearing gloves. Mrs Hudson handed him the bag from the kitchen bin and he took them directly out.  
  
Finally, he had tackled the sitting room while she scrubbed the kitchen sink and counters. The coffee table was more of a biohazard than Baskerville had ever been, he reflected as he triple-bagged hypodermics, tourniquets, vials, empty plastic bags—it seemed endless. He dug through the cushions on the sofa and the chairs. The desk was still stripped bare, but he went through the drawers. He poked behind the books and under the sofa and along the top of the mirror and finally lifted the skull.  
  
A single cigarette fell out of it.  
  
A plain, ordinary cigarette. Not menthol, he noted with a sad smile.  
  
He put the cigarette back in the skull and carefully replaced it on the mantel.  
  
“Oh, there you are!” Mrs Hudson exclaimed. Sherlock was standing at the door, looking uncertainly into the sitting room. He caught sight of John and frowned.  
  
“Why’re you toushing my skull?” he demanded. John tipped his head slightly and realized that Greg was behind the younger man. A slight movement and Sherlock stumbled into the room, Lestrade’s hand on his lower back.  
  
“Come on. Coat off,” the older man murmured, helping him with it.  
  
“I can… do it… myself,” he spat out unconvincingly, fighting with one of the sleeves before dropping it on the floor. He had a bandage on his forehead. He collapsed onto the sofa and immediately began to peel it off.  
  
“Oi! Sherlock! We talked about this!” Greg shouted.  
  
“I wan’ John to see,” Sherlock snarled back. “Make… sure those idiots at A & E did… did it right.”  
  
“I’m sure it’s fine,” Mrs Hudson said, coming in from the kitchen.  
  
“I wan’ a scar,” Sherlock pouted. “A nithe big one. Like a pirate.”  
  
“Of course you do,” John murmured, rolling his eyes. He stripped off his gloves and approached his friend a bit warily.  
  
“They gave him painkillers,” Greg offered. “I told them not to.”  
  
“At this point it could do no conceivable harm,” John commented drily.  
  
“One of the nurses jus’ had breath…st implants,” Sherlock commented. “She thinks it’s to impreth…sss her boyfriend, but it was impress…ssing the… the female doct’r more.”  
  
Mrs Hudson put her hand to her mouth to hide the smile.  
  
“I’ve already heard this one,” Greg commented. “I’ve got to get going. Make sure my team isn’t filing any complaints.”  
  
“Yeah. Yes. Please. I’ve got it from here.”  
  
Sherlock frowned even more at that. “Since when did I… become an ‘it’?” he demanded. He looked down in front of himself at the bare coffee table. And froze.  
  
“I think it’s time for Mrs Hudson to go downstairs, hmmm?” John muttered.  
  
She and Greg left together.  
  
John turned to his friend. Sherlock’s eyes had wandered over the rest of the flat. He suddenly lurched to his feet, swaying. John put his hands out and Sherlock slapped them away, stalking off uncertainly toward his bedroom, and then the bath.  
  
He stumbled back into the sitting room, listing slightly to the left, and leaned against the door frame.  
  
“Youcleaned,” he mumbled.  
  
“Yes, Mrs Hudson and I cleaned. There was sick and blood on the bathroom floor and a plethora of paraphernalia on the coffee table.”  
  
“Pleth’ra. You… been working on… your vocab’lary…”  
  
“I got a calendar. Word of the day. Sit down,” John said sharply, moving toward him. “When did you eat last?” He helped him to sit down.  
  
“Whaz today?”  
  
“Thursday.”  
  
Sherlock considered for a bit. “Toos-day?” he finally offered.  
  
“Fuck, Sherlock. All right. Done.”  
  
“Done?” Sherlock looked up at him quizzically.  
  
John glanced at the stitches. Oh, they would scar for sure. Oh, good.  
  
“Done with all this. With the drugs. With not eating. With torturing yourself with crimes.”  
  
Sherlock frowned.  
  
“Not… torch… torch-ring myself. Mm fine.”  
  
John chose to ignore that. “You need to let the painkillers wear off and eat,” he stated.  
  
Sherlock chose to ignore that. He was too busy coughing.  
  
*  
  
John was extremely hesitant, but he allowed Sherlock to take a bath on his own. He absolutely refused to let him shower and he left the bathroom door open and he paused every few minutes to listen while he put together a simple dinner for them. In a terrible way, he was grateful for the coughing. If he was coughing, he was breathing.  
  
Sherlock surprised him by dressing in a pair of his fitted trousers and one of his elegant shirts. Well, everything had been fitted and elegant at one time. Now everything was painfully loose, but John didn’t say anything. Sherlock’s hands shook terribly, but he had managed to button the cuffs.  
  
Oh. Right. Long sleeves. That’s why.  
  
Dinner did not go well. Sherlock took three bites—small ones, and only after John took a bite each time. The doctor offered the detective forkfuls from his own plate, but he refused to eat any more, pushing angrily away from the table. He scooped up a book and collapsed onto the sofa, resolutely pretending to read.  
  
“Sherlock,” John stated firmly, standing by his chair. “I need to check on you.”  
  
“Check on what, John?” he spat back.  
  
“Your breathing.”  
  
“Obviously I’m breathing, John,” he smirked.  
  
And then he coughed.  
  
“And your temperature and your pulse and your eyes and all your bloody cuts and…” John stopped himself. Sherlock looked at him expectantly. John shook himself. “All right. We’re going to do this right.”


	13. Patient

“What are you?” John demanded.  
  
“What?”  
  
“Right here, right now. What am I, and what are you?”  
  
“I don’t understand,” Sherlock said slowly; uncharacteristically.  
  
“I have that on a t-shirt,” John replied drily. “I am a doctor, Sherlock. In fact, I’m _your_ doctor. So what does that make you?”  
  
“A… patient?”  
  
“My patient, to be exact.” John nodded once, briskly. “And as such, you are going to submit to a thorough exam, and then you and I are going to have a long talk.”  
  
“John, you’ve done nothing but poke and prod at me for months.” Sherlock was sliding from confusion and impatience toward pout.  
  
John went into the kitchen and cleared the table of Sherlock’s uneaten dinner. “Fuck, Sherlock,” he muttered under his breath. Then he took a deep breath and turned toward his patient. “That was treating circumstances as they came up. Now I’m going to start from scratch. Take off your shirt and sit up on the table.”  
  
Sherlock passed through pout and was turning left into strop when John, who had wiped off the table and was digging through his medical bag, put up his hand.  
  
“Nope. No more of that. I am your doctor and you will submit to an examination and we will have a long, probably awful talk, or you will not be permitted to see the baby again.”  
  
Sherlock’s mouth fell open in shock. “You wouldn’t…” he stuttered, attempting a sneering tone. It failed miserably.  
  
“Yes. Yes I would, and after the last incident, so would Mary. And I know how much it calms you to be with her. So that’s why I’m doing this. Because it _matters,_ Sherlock. She matters to you and you matter to us. Now, come over here, take off that bloody expensive shirt, and sit the fuck down.”  
  
Sherlock Holmes complied.  
  
“First, we’re going to deal with the physical.” John slipped his stethoscope into his ears. Sherlock shut his eyes.  
  
Fifteen minutes later, John removed the stethoscope from around his neck and sat in his chair in the sitting room. He turned on his medical dictation device. He began speaking calmly, evenly. “Patient is a 38-year-old Caucasian male. Visual exam, upper body: Patient is exceedingly pale. Dark circles under his eyes. Eyes are glassy, bloodshot, and watering excessively. Sluggish response to light. Recently (and badly) stitched wound on the forehead—no concussion. Hands are trembling. Fingers on both hands are yellowed from nicotine. Both forearms exhibit multiple track marks, including at least one that appears to be infected, and there are two sets of three very deep cuts on the underside of the left forearm that appear to be healing very slowly. There are bruises on the left elbow and wrist, and three grazed knuckles on the right hand. Patient is underweight, with ribs prominent. Hair is dull. Fingernails are brittle.  
  
“Patient’s abdomen is covered with a series of what appear to be razor cuts that form lines and crosses. No letters, numbers, or recognizable symbols.”  
  
Sherlock, still seated on the kitchen table, his head slumped to his chest, cocked his head a bit at this.  
  
“Patient has scars on his upper back. These are consistent with his status as someone who has undergone torture. Upon closer examination, patient’s back reveals faint scars—lines—on his shoulders, much older than the marks of torture.  
  
“Additional scarring on the patient’s scalp, hands, arms, face, and abdomen are consistent with patient’s known history of an… active lifestyle and career and being…” John had to take a breath here. “Being shot at close range.”  
  
Sherlock had obviously begun to tune him out. He closed his eyes again. John continued.  
  
“Physical exam, upper body: Patient’s skin is hot. Pinch test reveals dehydration. Pulse is rapid.” Here, John noted Sherlock’s alarmingly low blood pressure and elevated temperature as well as his pulse rate. “Patient’s breathing is shallow. Although a confirmed smoker, wheezing and coughing along with fever and rapid pulse suggests bronchitis. No sign of inflammation of the tonsils, but lymph nodes under the jaw are slightly swollen and tender. Vision seems to be clear at the moment. Hearing is acute. Senses of taste and smell are reduced, probably because of habitual smoking. Sense of touch is elevated; overly sensitive.”  
  
Sherlock sighed. His eyes opened as the sigh set off a coughing bout. He shot a dirty look at John.  
  
John returned to the kitchen. “All right, Sherlock. Stand up.”  
  
Sherlock rolled his eyes but complied, a small frown crossing his face as he swayed a bit. John put out a steadying hand but didn’t say anything. They waited a few seconds.  
  
“All right?”  
  
Sherlock nodded.  
  
“All right. Trousers off.”  
  
Sherlock complied, his trousers so loose that he barely had to unfasten his flies to get them to slither to the floor. He stepped out of them with John hovering, ready to steady him if necessary. “I can manage,” Sherlock spat out.  
  
“Sit,” John ordered. Sherlock got himself back onto the table, his long legs dangling. John took a deep breath before proceeding with his examination. He had Sherlock stand again at one point, unabashedly pulling the waistband of his pants away. He then turned away and dug the bathroom scale out from under the kitchen sink, where it had landed after an experiment. He put it on the floor in front of Sherlock and nudged it into life. “Come on. Up on it.”  
  
John found himself blinking hard a few times at the number on the digital display.  
  
“Go on, get dressed and go sit down,” he murmured, his throat tight.  
  
He joined Sherlock a few minutes later, having wiped down the table again and shoved the scale into a corner rather viciously. He sat down and started dictating again. Sherlock had curled up sideways in his chair, his eyes shut. He had put his trousers and shirt back on and had buttoned it but hadn’t bothered to tuck it in or do up the cuff buttons. He looked exhausted.  
  
“Visual exam, lower body: Patient’s previously noted razor cuts extend from the abdomen down the front of both thighs, more pronounced on the right leg, consistent with patient being predominantly right-handed. There are also several very old, round scars on the rear of the thighs and the lower buttocks; probable cause being deliberate cigarette burns. There are bruises on the right hip, both knees, and both shins. Legs show additional scarring consistent with patient’s lifestyle. Feet show scarring consistent with patient’s history of torture in recent past.”  
  
Was Sherlock asleep? John couldn’t be sure.  
  
“Physical exam, lower body: Reflexes are normal. No inflammation of glands in groin. Weight is…” John took a deep breath. “Weight is 54 point 5 kilograms. At one hundred eighty-three centimeters, this makes the patient’s BMI 16.4.”  
  
John stopped. Sighed and ran his hand through his short hair.  
  
“Sherlock?”  
  
“Mmm?”  
  
“Come on. You can’t sleep in that chair that way.”  
  
Sherlock struggled to sit upright.  
  
“Besides, now you get to talk.”  
  
“Oh. Good.”  
  
“Sherlock…”  
  
“All right, _doctor_ ,” he spat out, venom even in his diminished voice. And then he coughed.  
  
“All right, _patient_ ,” John shot back. “I’ve done the physical bit—barring actual tests, of course—and yes I do mean you get to piss in a jar and I get to take blood, but not here—I want to do that down at the surgery.”  
  
Sherlock groaned.  
  
“Shut up, Sherlock,” John said, smiling. Oh. That smile. Sherlock knew that smile. He sat up a bit straighter and pushed his hair out of his eyes. “Good. That’s better. Now.” He turned the recorder back on. “No need to be evasive at this point. You were involved in a shooting at Christmas. What have you been taking since then? And don’t fuck with me, Sherlock. You know what I mean. Remember what’s at stake here.”  
  
Sherlock found that he couldn’t look John in the eye. He stared at the man’s sensible shoes, and when he tried to speak, it took two tries to get his voice to work properly. “Co… cocaine. Heroin. Marijuana. Ecstasy. Codeine. Tramadol. Pethadine. Morphine. Benzodiazepines. Temazepam. Zolpidem. And… something… blue. A tablet. Once. I didn’t like that. Ask Wiggins.”  
  
“God, Sherlock.” They sat in silence for a minute. John finally shook himself and continued his questioning. “And how would evaluate your mental state at this point—your cognitive functioning?”  
  
Sherlock, his eyes still on John’s shoes, drew his brows together in concentration. How, indeed? He took a few seconds to gather his thoughts. He tried to lick his lips, but his mouth was so dry it was not worth the effort.  
  
“At first, it was fine. All that work that Mycroft needed me for. The… M word. My own cases. Lestrade’s. More than fine.”  
  
“And then? What changed?”  
  
“I… when…” Sherlock made a strangled noise.  
  
“Come on. You can do this,” John murmured encouragingly.  
  
“After… after Moran. After I caught Moran. I… it was harder. I was having a harder time picking up on clues. I was missing things. Obvious things. _Anderson_ things.”  
  
John couldn’t help it. He smiled a genuine smile this time, and Sherlock smiled weakly back, appreciative that his little joke had been well received. John sobered up quickly, though.  
  
“Was it that you were missing things, or was it more as if something was in the way?”  
  
“What do you mean?” Sherlock frowned.  
  
“If your hearing is going, you miss things. If there’s a louder noise than what you’re listening for, there’s something in the way.”  
  
“Oh. Um. There was…” and Sherlock’s eyes opened wide in realization. “There was something in the way. Something louder than the cases.”  
  
“Good job.” John licked his lips. “And now. I have to ask this, Sherlock. I know you hate this. I promise you, I do understand how hard this is. But I have to ask—”  
  
Sherlock tried steepling his hands under his chin, but they were trembling so much he found it impossible.  
  
“How are you feeling? _What_ are you feeling?” God. The questions felt like broken glass in his mouth.  
  
“About what?” Sherlock finally replied, his voice cold and flat. He had placed his hands on his knees. His color had changed from simply pale to grey.  
  
John took a deep breath, Mycroft’s words spinning through his brain like a drill. “About shooting a man in the head.”  
  
Sherlock made it as far as the kitchen sink, John a step behind to rub his back as he heaved into it for five minutes.  
  
“Question answered,” John said quietly.  
  
“John, go away, there’s a good fellow,” Sherlock rasped, coughing heavily.  
  
John frowned. He led the too-thin man to the sofa, letting him lie down as he grabbed an afghan from its back. He tucked him in gently, stroking his unruly curls away from his pale face.  
  
“I’m going to make tea, and you’re going to have some. And Mrs Hudson brought up your favorite biscuits before, and you’re going to have some of them, too.”  
  
“Jammie dodgers?” Sherlock asked. God, he sounded like a toddler, and he was shaking badly.  
  
“Of course,” John assured him, filling the kettle.  
  
They spent the next few minutes in silence. John made two mugs of tea and put some of Mrs Hudson’s biscuits on a clean plate. He put both mugs and the plate of biscuits on the coffee table, then grabbed the remote and flicked on the telly as Sherlock struggled to sit up and make room for his doctor on the sofa.  
  
He ended up helping the consulting detective with his tea, as his hands were shaking so much he couldn’t hold his mug properly. He also discovered that he had to take a bite of each jammie dodger before he gently—very gently—fed them to him. Sherlock needed to be reminded to chew a few times. Finally, Sherlock laid down again as John slid onto the floor, his back against the sofa, six inches from Sherlock’s face. He wanted to hear him breath.  
  
“Sherlock,” he finally said softly. “I’m not sure we can handle all this on our own.”  
  
“What in God’s name do you mean, John?” Sherlock responded, coughing.  
  
“Doctor, right?”  
  
Sherlock nodded.  
  
“Okay, when a doctor is in over his head, what does he do?”  
  
“He calls in a consult…” Sherlock frowned.  
  
“Yeah. That’s right. And right now, I am your doctor and I am totally, completely beyond my ken. I’ve dealt with soldiers who couldn’t face the fact that they’ve killed for their country. That wasn’t nearly as complicated. I’d love to tell you some of the same stuff I told them. Crown and country and all that. Magnussen certainly falls under that umbrella. But it’s… so much more with you.”  
  
Sherlock, his eyes shut, snorted. “Of course I’m more, John,” he stated derisively.  
  
And John, who hadn’t heard that tone of voice in ages, nearly burst into tears. Instead, he took a breath, and—he laughed. “Git,” he responded.  
  
They sat for a bit. John picked up a hedgehog biscuit, showed it to Sherlock. Bit into it. Offered it to Sherlock. Sherlock took a bite, grimacing a bit.  
  
“Vitamin C, Sherlock,” John admonished. He glared at the consulting detective. “Oh, please. I do know signs of scurvy. The bruises, slow healing, gums a mess... with your eating habits I shouldn’t be surprised. I have to add that to my report.” And then he sighed. “Would you like to get some orange juice tomorrow?” he asked gently.  
  
“I sup…” Sherlock yawned. “…pose.”  
  
John waited a tick. Ironically, when Sherlock showed signs of fatigue, it meant that John had a few minutes to arrange things before a crash. It was when he went from 100 mph to nothing in two seconds that John was caught flat.  
  
“Okay. You’re knackered. Time for bed. We’ll talk in the morning.” He got up and patted Sherlock on the shoulder.  
  
“You’re staying?” Sherlock mumbled before coughing.  
  
“Of course I’m staying.” John gathered the mugs and empty plate; headed for the kitchen to at least put them in the sink. He glared at the plate with the remains of Sherlock’s uneaten dinner adhering to it. He’d deal with it in the morning. He thought about it for a second. Returned to the sofa. Offered his mobile. “Would you like to let Mary know?”  
  
Sherlock wordlessly took the phone and entered a text message. It was past 11 PM, but the response came immediately.  
  
“Good. Get some sleep. We love you”  
  
3.12 AM  
  
“Sherlock. Sherlock! It’s okay. It’s okay. I’m here. John. I’m here.”  
  
“Go away. He’ll hurt you,” Sherlock hissed.  
  
“No. No, he will not. I won’t let him.”  
  
“He’ll hurt _me!_ ” Sherlock insisted, coughing.  
  
“No. No, Sherlock. He is dead. He cannot hurt you or anyone else, ever. Not anymore. Not ever.”  
  
“He’ll hurt you where no one else will see, and you can’t tell anyone, or show anyone, because otherwise he’ll hurt Mummy and Dad and Mycroft.” Sherlock could barely speak through his violent, deep cough.  
  
“No, he will not. I am a badass army captain with a gun and he most certainly will not hurt me, or you, or anyone else.”  
  
Sherlock seemed to consider this for a second. Then he nodded.  
  
“Come on, now. Wake up. Sit all the way up for me. Come on,” John encouraged, helping the thin man up by his shoulders.  
  
John had decided. In the morning he would take Sherlock down to the surgery for tests, and then he would get in contact with Mycroft Holmes. They had to fix this, and soon, or there wouldn’t be a consulting detective left to save.  
  



	14. Promising

“Sherlock, you promised.”  
  
“When did I promise, John?” the dark-haired man scowled, pushing away his breakfast plate.  
  
“Last night.” John pushed the plate back.  
  
“You’ve told me numerous times that I talk in my sleep. I must have been sleeping. Otherwise there is no way I would have agreed to this.” Sherlock pushed his plate away again, more viciously this time. He coughed.  
  
John got an Orange Squash out of the fridge, showed it to Sherlock, opened it, pretended to take a sip, and handed it to him.  
  
“I like Tizer better,” Sherlock grumbled, but he did take a few sips and the coughing subsided.  
  
“Then on our way back from the surgery, we’ll get you some.” John smiled.  
  
Sherlock, staring at him over the can from which he was drinking, looked a bit alarmed. He knew that smile.  
  
“Well, if you’re going to go all soldiery and insist, I suppose I could.”  
  
“Good choice.” John pushed his own plate casually toward Sherlock, then made a point of getting up to pour himself more coffee. When he turned back, half of his toast was gone and Sherlock was chewing. “Good job,” he murmured into his mug.  
  
*  
  
“Yeah, it’s definitely bronchitis,” John said into his mobile. “And a multitude of drugs, legal and otherwise. Vitamin deficiency. We’ve got to wait on some of the other results, but it’s enough for now.”  
  
“Enough for what?” Lestrade queried.  
  
“Enough to make a point. I am out of my depth here. I can treat him for the physical stuff, of course, but he needs some kind of therapy—immediately.”  
  
“That’s going to be… impossible.” Seated at his desk in New Scotland Yard, Greg ran his hand through his hair and sighed into the telephone receiver.  
  
“Highly unlikely, I know. Oh, listen. He’s back. I’ve got to run. I’ll phone you later.”  
  
Lestrade groaned and leaned back in his chair, his eyes shut. How the hell were they supposed to get Sherlock Holmes into therapy? Trick him?  
  
“Was that Mary?” Sherlock asked, dropping his selections into the trolley.  
  
“Yeah,” John muttered, examining the man’s choices. Crap, junk, and junky crap prepackaged stuff, mostly sweet, but he wasn’t going to quibble. It was calories.  
  
“Is she well? Is the baby all right?” Sherlock’s long fingers were suddenly wrapped tightly on the side of the trolley.  
  
“They’re fine. Hey, didn’t we discuss orange juice? And patches? You cannot continue smoking with that cough.”  
  
Sherlock nodded a bit sadly and set out to get some. Coughing.  
  
*  
  
John pursed his lips. How did a man who rarely if ever set foot in a grocery store and who was barely functioning due to illness manage to whiz through the self-check-out line without a problem? Sherlock shot him a rare smile as he slid his card through the chip-and-PIN machine.  
  
“Prick,” John offered conversationally as he bagged their purchases. Sherlock grinned a bit wickedly back.  
  
It was almost like old times, he thought as they set back to the flat. Except that Sherlock wasn’t walking at his usual breakneck pace or endlessly deducing the crowds. Speaking apparently set off his cough, and he was also quite obviously weak and unenergetic.  
  
And in the old times, John’s mind wasn’t taken up desperately trying to figure out a way to get the brilliant consulting detective to talk to a therapist. He hated continually using the threat of not seeing the baby. She was one of the few things that calmed him, and it seemed cruel to taunt him like that. He had already considered and dismissed the idea of someone else suggesting it—even Mrs Hudson would probably not be successful.  
  
“John, do keep up,” Sherlock’s low voice interrupted his ruminations. The light at the corner had changed and they charged across the busy street along with the rest of the crowd.  
  
The crowd. Sherlock, bored by the walk, had apparently decided it worth the risk of setting off a coughing fit and was now deducing a middle-aged couple walking in front of them.  
  
An idea took seed in John’s brain. It was a possibility. A distinct possibility.  
  
*  
  
He met Lestrade at the bar this time, ordering with an upraised hand and a nod a beer for each. “I’ve got an idea,” he started in immediately. For the first time in ages, he felt optimistic. With some help, it would work. It had to work.  
  
He outlined his plan to the D.I., who at first looked skeptical. “Do you think he’d buy it?” he demanded.  
  
“We’d need help, of course. Access to the records, photos…”  
  
“Couldn’t his smart-arse brother do all that?”  
  
“Exactly my plan,” John grinned. “It’s about time the man actually did something to help.”  
  
“So I’m supposed to convince him I’ve got a cold case about a shooting.”  
  
“That part should be easy.”  
  
“But somehow hide the fact that it’s Sherlock who was involved.”  
  
“That’s where Mycroft will come in. He has access to the best forgers in the country. He can have enough dummy records created to throw him off the scent at first. The fact that he’s so ill will, ironically, work to our advantage. He’s nowhere near the top of his game. He admitted it himself.”  
  
“And you think that in the course of figuring out what happened, and that it’s in fact about him, will fix him?”  
  
“Well, not really fix him, but if we can at least get him to remember what happened, maybe then he’ll agree to talk to a therapist about it.”  
  
Lestrade considered the ex-army captain who stood in front of him, leaning against the bar, sipping his beer. “You’re a crafty bugger, John Watson,” he admitted. “And I pray to God this works.”  
  
*  
  
John prayed, too, and fervently as he was ushered into Mycroft’s office again. This time, attempting to hold his temper, he had texted the man. Not before calling Sherlock’s parents, however.  
  
“John, dear, how are you?” Mrs Holmes had answered.  
  
“Fine.”  
  
“And Mary and the baby?”  
  
“They’re fine, as well.” John could hear in his own voice how flat he sounded. The woman was a genius. Surely she knew better…  
  
“We’ve been so worried. I’m sure you’ve had your hands full, but it seems ages. How is he?”  
  
Ah. Of course they had been worried. He smiled sadly at the affection that Sherlock seemed so unable to accept. But now it was time… he was a doctor. He had to do this all the time. Somehow, this time, it was much harder.  
  
“Honestly? He’s not well at all.” He let that sink in.  
  
It did.  
  
“Is he… is he still doing… _that_?”  
  
“He has been, but now. Well. He’s got bronchitis, among other problems. And not eating. And not sleeping. And… oh, you know all of this.” John stopped in exasperation.  
  
“Well, yes, actually, we do,” her warm voice finally replied. It sounded—beaten.  
  
“Greg… Detective Inspector Lestrade… and I have been staying with him. Switching off, I mean. And I’m running some tests. But we have a plan now…”  
  
“Wait. Let me get Dad on the extension.”  
  
And Mr and Mrs Holmes listened.  
  
*  
  
“Gotta couple of cold cases. Figured I’d stop by with them, hey?” Sherlock wasn’t the only good actor in the room. D.I. Lestrade had certainly put his talents to use on cases before—particularly when questioning suspects.  
  
“Hey, Greg,” John called out from the kitchen. “Perfect timing. Tea?”  
  
“Yeah, ta,” the silver-haired man called back, dumping a pile of files on the coffee table in front of the sofa. Sherlock, who was seated at his desk, jabbing at the keys of his laptop in a somewhat vicious way, looked at the stack first, and then at their deliverer.  
  
“Criminals on holiday?” he asked.  
  
“A bit quiet, yeah.”  
  
“And Anderson is mercifully quiet as well, then?” Lestrade couldn’t help smiling at Sherlock’s snipe. At least it was normal. These days, any little bit of any normal felt more like a life preserver in the middle of the ocean.  
  
John entered, carefully carrying three steaming mugs.  
  
“Better help him,” Sherlock commented drily. “He’s got steady hands, but they’re not that big.”  
  
“Oi!” John shouted in mock outrage.  
  
Tea settled, Lestrade plunked down on the sofa, making a face when he hit a lump. Rummaging around, he dug a dummy out from the cushions.  
  
“Yours?” he remarked smugly, waving it at Sherlock, who ignored him.  
  
“Oh, that’s where that went,” John interjected. “We lose at least one a week.”  
  
“Which would be prevented if you took my precaution of getting one of those clips…” Sherlock muttered, staring intently at his screen.  
  
“Yeah, I’ll get right on that,” John shot back. Lestrade, who was nearly in tears at how familiar it all sounded, and pointedly trying not to think about how long it had been since he had heard the men trade barbs, made a point of ignoring Sherlock, turning toward John, who had seated himself in his comfortable chair.  
  
“So what brings you here? Thought you were lurking in the suburbs these days.”  
  
“Just a visit. Mary took the baby to Sussex Downs to see a friend, so I had some spare time.”  
  
“He’s spying on me, as he has been for months, and you are, too,” Sherlock spat out, interrupting. “Lestrade, don’t pretend you don’t know. He’s practically moved back in—uninvited. And when he’s not here, you are. Or Mrs Hudson. Or Mary. I even had a visit from my _parents_.” He shuddered. “I might be a bit off my mark lately, but I am _aware_.” He coughed.  
  
“Fat lot of good it’s done any of us,” Lestrade responded evenly. He preferred an offended consulting detective to a strung-out or hallucinating one any day of the week. “Are you going to help me with these or not?” He waved a hand at the files.  
  
Sherlock rolled his eyes. “Oh, all right,” he acquiesced, holding an imperious hand out.  
  
Lestrade pretended not to notice how much it was shaking, or the nicotine patch on the white forearm. He handed him the first file on the stack.  
  
Sherlock opened it, leaning back in his desk chair and absently reaching for his tea. He looked at it, then at John. John took a sip of his tea, almost unconsciously. Sherlock followed suit.  
  
Fifteen minutes later, Sherlock closed the file and sighed. “Arrest the petrol station attendant,” he mumbled.  
  
“Really?” Lestrade turned away from the telly; he and John had just found something decent to watch.  
  
Sherlock snorted. “No, not ‘really.’ Arrest the victim’s five-year-old daughter, and make sure she doesn’t continue to operate any motor vehicles, either, as I’m fairly sure that that’s illegal.”  
  
“Sorry. All right. Walk me through it.”  
  
Sherlock, even slowed by illness, reeled off his deductions almost too fast for them to keep up. Lestrade made him stop and go back a few times, and Sherlock made a brilliant show of being disgusted, but it was the most he had been engaged in anything in ages. John smiled into his tea. It might work.  
  
The next case took Sherlock twenty minutes and got him rather excited about nail varnish. John did not need to be a genius of Sherlock’s caliber to know where that was leading. He sighed and wondered how long it would take to air out the flat from the next experiment, frowning as Sherlock tried to muffle a coughing fit with his hand.  
  
The third case in the stack—the next to last—took Sherlock seven minutes flat. Not his all-time fastest from a case file, but close, and it was especially impressive because not only did he finger the suspect, he also somehow introduced a completely unknown accomplice. “It was an inside job,” he growled. “Therefore, someone had to be _inside_. Obvious.” He coughed longer this time.  
  
Last file. John made a point of ignoring it entirely, gathering up the mugs. He frowned at Sherlock’s, which was still nearly full. “You promised,” he pointed out as Sherlock s narrowed his eyes in annoyance. “Do you want Tizer?” Sherlock shrugged and John padded into the kitchen, dumping the mugs in the sink and grabbing a bottle of red juice from the fridge. He stood in front of Sherlock and handed him the bottle. Sherlock, whose attention was back on his laptop (John glanced over and yes, he was on the Marks and Spencer website, ordering multiple bottles of nail varnish—apparently all the same frankly alarming shade of pink, but all different brands), grasped the bottle and checked the top, then handed it to John. John opened it, took a small sip, and handed it back. Both of them did this seemingly automatically at this point. Lestrade watched, his mouth tight. He hadn’t been around in a week or so, and he was certainly well-versed in the ritual, but he had hoped that there had been some lessening of the rules by now.  
  
“Here, finish up, and then let’s get some take-away,” Lestrade interjected, shoving the last file at him.  
  
Sherlock flipped it open lazily, glancing at each of several photographs in rapid succession before getting to the hand-written notes and typed records. He frowned.  
  
“This _is_ a cold one,” he commented.  
  
“Yeah. Some family member filed a complaint; made us drag it up again.”  
  
“A complaint?” John asked. He had deliberately left the details of the forged case to Lestrade and Mycroft so he could be more honestly puzzled. Sherlock was going to be hard enough to fool as it was, and John knew that his face would give him away.  
  
“An appeal. They do it every few years—claim we got it wrong.”  
  
“So there’s been a conviction?” Sherlock shot out, now skimming rapidly through the rest of the file.  
  
“There was. Sixteen years ago, a young man went to jail for murdering his father.”  
  
“And there’s a possibility that he’s not guilty?” John interjected.  
  
“I can’t see how, but if we got the wrong bloke, we owe it to him to fix it,” Lestrade replied. Sherlock’s eyes were now fixed firmly on the file, and the D.I. felt free to observe him closely. He didn’t need to look over to know that John was doing the same.  
  
And they were both astounded as one of the world’s most perceptive men looked coolly at a file that detailed his own horrific involvement in the shooting of his tormentor and apparently didn’t recognize a thing.  
  
“They’re right,” he responded fifteen or so minutes later. “He didn’t shoot him. Or rather, his statement that the father had his hand on the trigger first is accurate. Actually…” He paused and examined two of the photos extremely closely. “Yes. There. No. The son had his hand over his father’s, but he didn’t have his finger on the trigger or even on top of the finger that _did_ pull the trigger.” He closed the file and handed it back to Lestrade, sounding bored.  
  
“So we were wrong,” Lestrade said slowly. The horror on his face was genuine, even if Sherlock didn’t yet realize what he was horrified about. “And you know this how?”  
  
“It’s in the pattern of the powder on their hands,” Sherlock replied coolly.  
  
“Show me,” Lestrade choked out, a worried glance at John.  
  
Sherlock huffed and got up, glancing around until he spotted something on the cluttered desk. “Ah, perfect!” he exclaimed, grabbing what looked like a hand gun but what John knew for a fact was a lighter—one identical to that used by the cabbie in their first case together, he realized with a start. The consulting detective whirled around and handed it to Lestrade.  
  
“Here. Stand up. Perfect. You’re just that much taller than me that this should work. Hold it in your right hand, finger on the trigger, to your temple.”  
  
Lestrade complied, feeling his mouth go dry with anxiety.  
  
“Now, the son’s statement said he was trying to stop him. If he had been facing him and grabbed the gun with his left hand, it would have been obvious. But he was almost behind him—move over—like this.” Sherlock startled both of them by suddenly grabbing Lestrade’s right hand with his while simultaneously wrapping his left arm around the older man’s waist.  
  
And then he froze.  
  
“John, come over here,” he commanded, his lips so close to Lestrade’s ear he felt them brush the shell.  
  
John jumped up and dashed over.  
  
“Can you see the placement of my hand?” Sherlock demanded.  
  
“Yes.”  
  
“Take a photo of it.”  
  
John complied as quickly as he could.  
  
Sherlock released the D.I., who dropped the lighter to the coffee table as if it was burning him.  
  
“Now, Lestrade, if that dullard Anderson can reconstruct what I just demonstrated and replicate the direction of the powder from the gun, you’ll find that there is no way that their hands could have shown the pattern they did unless they were positioned exactly in that fashion. He had his hand over his father’s, but he most certainly did not have his finger on the trigger. He was trying to stop the man from killing himself, not shoot him.”  
  
“Incredible,” John exclaimed, unable to help himself.  
  
“Has the son been locked up for this for all these years?” he asked Lestrade with a frown, ignoring the doctor.  
  
“Yeah, he’s been locked up, all right,” Lestrade breathed out.  
  
“Chinese?” Sherlock said suddenly.  
  
“What?”  
  
“Take-away. I’m in the mood for a Chinese.”  
  
“Oh. Oh! All right. I’ll order,” John offered, turning to grab a well-worn menu from the floor, hiding his face from the two other men.  
  
*  
  
“You want some beer?” Lestrade asked casually, slipping on his coat.  
  
“NO!”  
  
The greying man snickered at the emphatic response. “All right. I’m going to nip out and pick some up for me and John.” He slipped out of the flat, shutting the door behind him. He dashed down the stairs and opened and closed the street door loudly. He then slipped into 221A as quietly as he could. John was there, ostensibly asking Mrs Hudson if she’d like to join them for dinner, but what they really needed was a few seconds to talk without being overheard.  
  
“What was that?” Lestrade demanded in a whisper. Mrs Hudson sat in her easy chair, looking distraught. She turned up the telly to mask their conversation further.  
  
“That was Sherlock re-proving his innocence in the murder of his stepfather while not detecting forged court documents OR the fact that he was looking at photos of _his own hand_.”  
  
“He was completely dissociated from it, wasn’t he?” The D.I.’s color was off; he was pale.  
  
“So far, yeah. But if he’s true to his pattern, tonight’s going to be hell.” John’s jaw was clamped so tight he could barely speak.  
  
“You want me to stay, too?”  
  
“Oh, God, yes!”  
  
*  
  
Gregory Lestrade had a high tolerance for a lot of things. Beer was just one of them. He also had a knack for disguising just how much he was drinking. Most of the time, especially at official functions, it had been a matter of knocking back four or five while making it look like he had only had two. Now, though, he was using tricks from his undercover days. Taking small sips while looking as if you were taking long swigs. Opening one can before the first was empty; switching between them; keeping John’s cans equally mixed up. Still, Lestrade was grateful that Sherlock’s attention wasn’t really on him, or surely he would have noticed.  
  
Instead the man was focused quite intently on the food that was on the kitchen table in front of him. John had opened up all the containers in front of him, showing him the sealed chopsticks before peeling the paper wrapper from them as well.  
  
The doctor had then patiently opened up all the dipping sauces, carefully putting each lid next to its appropriate plastic dish.  
  
And now he was methodically taking a bit of food from each container, dipping it in one sauce, and popping it in his mouth. Sherlock was watching him with the intensity he usually applied to microscope slides.  
  
Finally John had taken a bite of every single food item they had ordered and tasted all the sauces. He nodded at Sherlock’s hand, which was gripped tightly around his own freshly-unwrapped chopsticks. “Hey,” he nudged, nodding toward the food.  
  
And slowly—very slowly—Sherlock began to eat.  
  
Lestrade knew that this was his cue to join in. He did so with gusto—suddenly starving—probably a let down from the tension of the afternoon. John’s appetite was not as hearty, but he put on a good show. And eventually Sherlock relaxed enough that when the doctor asked casually just what he planned to do with all that nail varnish, he snorted and rolled his eyes and made a point of describing his upcoming experiment as if he was explaining to a three-year-old just why he shouldn’t flush mobile phones down the toilet.  
  
By the time they were done, the extra food packed away (the irony that leftovers were always deemed “safe” by Sherlock considering the biohazard of a fridge not going over Lestrade’s head), and all three back in the sitting room, Lestrade had managed to “drink” three beers when he had actually barely consumed one, and the same went for John.  
  
They maintained their subterfuge while arguing over the match. Sherlock was ignoring them entirely and had taken up a book, in which he occasionally scribbled notes. John looked over at one point. “Hey! Sherlock! That’s one of my medical texts. Are you writing in it?”  
  
“I’m just correcting it, John,” Sherlock responded coolly, and John burst into genuine laughter.  
  
“You git,” he commented.  
  
A while later, the doctor glanced over. Sherlock, who was on the sofa, was starting to droop with exhaustion. John nodded at Lestrade, who glanced over and nodded back. “Okay. Five—what was it? Six beers? There’s no way I’m driving home. Mind if I kip here?” he asked.  
  
“Hmmm? What? Oh, fine.”  
  
“Me, too,” John commented. “I’m not going home reeking of beer and Chinese. But it’s bedtime for you. Now, if you please.” Without a word, Sherlock rose and walked slowly into his bedroom, carrying the medical text with him. “Sometimes he goes down easily,” he told the surprised man seated in Sherlock’s chair.  
  
“He’s not going to stay down, though.”  
  
“Not a chance.”  
  
They sat in silence for a few minutes.  
  
“Greg, go bolt the street door, will you?” John asked uneasily.  
  
3.20 AM  
  
“Christ, Sherlock!” Greg had rolled out of the chair in which he had dozed off and ducked behind it as various objects flew over his head. The younger man, dressed only in pyjama bottoms and an ancient t-shirt, was standing at his desk, hurling anything he could get his hands on in all directions.  
  
“Where is it? Where is it?” he demanded, snarling.  
  
“Where is what?” John shot back, running into the room.  
  
“The case file!”  
  
“Which case, Sherlock?” Greg asked, standing up slowly as the barrage of objects ceased.  
  
“The one… the one… the boy… who was falsely imprisoned…it was just…” he put his hand on the file.  
  
Oh, crap, thought John. The game’s up.  
  
Sherlock began tearing through the file, flipping photos and documents onto the floor as he searched through it frantically. He was muttering to himself.  
  
“No, no, no. This is wrong. This is… here. And here.”  
  
“What do you mean?”  
  
“I mean—these court records. Forgeries. I can’t believe I missed this before. Look. The names have been changed. And this—” he waved a document at them victoriously. “Wrong! This is just wrong. And half the photos are missing. What the hell were you trying to do?” he shot at the D.I.  
  
“Sherlock, I didn’t do anything to that file.” (It was true—Mycroft and his team had done it all.)  
  
“Well, someone did. There was a family member trying to get the case appealed, didn’t you say?”  
  
Lestrade nodded, unwilling to trust his voice.  
  
“Ah, yes. Probably the older brother. What was his alleged name?” he dug through the papers scattered on the floor.  
  
“Sherlock, can’t this wait until morning?” John interceded, walking hesitantly over to the man. “It’s three o’clock.”  
  
“What does that matter?”  
  
“It matters because you’re making a great deal of noise, and it’s the middle of the night, and your landlady…”  
  
And John stopped talking. Because Sherlock had stopped moving. He had squatted down to continue rifling through the flurry of papers on the floor, and he had just—stopped.  
  
And then his legs crumbled beneath him and he ended up kneeling on top of the forged court records.  
  
John was on his knees next to him immediately.  
  
“John,” the younger man’s voice rasped out, hoarse from shouting.  
  
“Yes?”  
  
“What. Is. This?”  
  
John turned his head and looked at Sherlock’s right hand. A hand that was holding—a photo of that very hand. It was unmistakable. And Sherlock had finally seen it.  
  
“That’s a photograph of your hand, Sherlock,” John said—very quietly. Very gently.  
  



	15. Sound and Fury

Chapter 15: Sound and Fury

_Sometimes I don’t talk for hours on end. Would that bother you? Potential flatmates should know the worst about each other._  
  
And that had been true, at times, but they seemed more than balanced out by diatribes and deductions and complaints and explanations and even silly evenings playing _Cluedo,_ during which Sherlock’s rich baritone had rolled and crashed and curled like waves on the shore in John’s head.  
  
And there were those two awful years when John would have given anything—anything—to hear that voice again. Two years when he would listen, over and over, to a few saved messages; watch the rare interviews until he had memorized every word.  
  
And then he had come back and even while attempting to throttle the throat out of which it came, John had positively reveled in hearing that voice again.  
  
And now?  
  
Sherlock had not made a single sound except for a worsening cough in twelve hours.  
  
 _I play the violin when I’m thinking._  
  
He also fidgeted and stalked and stomped and twitched and whirled and ran and spun and fought and shot and leapt and even danced.  
  
And now, Sherlock had not voluntarily moved an inch in twelve hours.  
  
 _Alone is what I have. Alone protects me._  
  
He had been alone, before Sherlock. And Sherlock had been alone before John. There was Lestrade, and Mrs Hudson, of course, and even though they drove him mad, there was his mother, and dad, and Mycroft. Molly. His homeless network. The countless clients. Angelo. For someone who valued—craved—bragged about being alone, Sherlock Holmes really hadn’t been.  
  
And now, Sherlock had locked himself in his Mind Palace and thrown away the key.  
  
John and Greg never left his side. At four in the morning they had carefully gotten the too-thin, too-ill man up from the floor, where his knees had crumpled the partially fake file detailing Stafford Holmes’ suicide. They got him on the sofa and Greg had seated himself on the coffee table directly in front of him while John had dashed to his bedroom, coming back with a dressing gown. He obediently leaned forward and moved his arms when John guided it onto him.  
  
He didn’t sit back again until John gently pressed his shoulders back.  
  
It was then that Greg felt his stomach do a deep and horrible slow flip. He swallowed, hard.  
  
“It’s called waxy flexibility,” John offered, clearing his throat.  
  
“Is it?” Greg responded numbly. “Did we… did we break him?”  
  
“A bit.”  
  
“Christ, John! What do we do?”  
  
“For now, we wait.”  
  
“For how long?” Greg Lestrade’s mouth was bone dry.  
  
“Until he processes it.” John, seated next to Sherlock on the sofa, put his fingers on his wrist, looked at his watch, and counted.  
  
And so the hours moved slowly. The sun came up. John made coffee and toast. Sherlock would drink anything held up to his lips, but they couldn’t get him to chew. He coughed and his fever went up. John gave Mrs Hudson a list and she came back with liquid paracetamol, cough syrup, and juice.  
  
“I’ll make some nice beef broth,” she whispered, tears in her eyes.  
  
“Thank you,” John whispered back.  
  
At that moment, Greg was sitting in front of Sherlock again, talking to him. Just talking. It didn’t really matter to anyone about what, although John was dimly aware that the detective inspector was recounting a particularly spectacular fail on the part of Anderson.  
  
A short time later, they got Sherlock up and into the loo. John stayed with him and Greg shut the door.  
  
Back to the sitting room. Into Sherlock’s chair this time, just for a change of scene.  
  
John stretched out on Sherlock’s bed, texting Mary, and surprised himself by sleeping for two hours. When he awoke, Greg was warming Mrs Hudson’s broth and making toasted-cheese-and-pickled-onion sandwiches for them.  
  
“Very nice,” John commented, biting into his.  
  
“Jamie Oliver,” Greg replied. John gave him a look. “What? I have to cook!” He wolfed down his own sandwich and dumped the plate in the sink. “I’ll do it,” he offered, pouring the now-warm broth into a mug and taking it over to Sherlock. He perched on the chair’s arm and held the mug to the man’s lips. Tipped it. “Come on, lad,” he murmured. He cradled the back of Sherlock’s head.  
  
Sherlock drank the broth a sip at a time, his eyes on his skull, which was on the floor.  
  
“Why don’t you get some sleep?” John suggested. Greg nodded and took his turn on Sherlock’s bed. He only slept for about an hour.  
  
No change.  
  
“Tea?” John offered. Greg nodded.  
  
Three mugs. Once again, Greg helped Sherlock with his. And this time, he took his turn taking the man to the loo. It wasn’t anything new, to be honest. And compared to all the near (and two actual) O.D.’s, and countless, messy, and miserable withdrawals, it was fine. It was all fine. Back to the sitting room. Seated him at his desk this time.  
  
John pursed his lips in curiosity when the older man woke up Sherlock’s laptop and poked rapidly at the keys. Several keystrokes and he had obviously found what he was looking for. He turned the computer slightly so Sherlock could, with encouragement (and a vivid imagination), listen to what was playing. He adjusted the volume and smiled a bit as the soothing sounds of Pachelbel’s “Canon in D” flowed out of the speakers.  
  
John raised his eyebrows. Greg shrugged. “Got this new thing… online music… you can pick by genre. Thought he’d like it.”  
  
“Oh, the depths of detective inspectors…” John murmured.  
  
“Well, if D.I.-Bloody-Morse can listen to opera…” and then he realized that John was teasing.  
  
“And yeah, it’s a good idea,” John soothed. “But not really my style. How about a game?”  
  
Half an hour later, it occurred to Greg. “Why, exactly, do you have _Operation_ here? And why am I losing miserably to you?”  
  
“Ask Mycroft. And—doctor? Steady hands? Remember?”  
  
Greg froze. And frowned.  
  
“Greg?” John prodded, gently.  
  
“Mycroft. Has he contacted you?”  
  
“Not in the past week. Not since you were in touch with him about the…” he glanced at Sherlock. He was facing his laptop’s monitor and the music Greg had selected continued to play, but it was utterly impossible to tell if the man was listening, or comprehending, or aware of their existence, or even aware of his own existence. “… that case file. “I thought he’d have followed up by now. He must know we’re both here. I got the file from his assistant about an hour before I came over.”  
  
John shrugged his shoulders. “I have no idea. Usually he’s up Sherlock’s arse if he doesn’t like the colour of his socks. But now… yeah. I don’t know. He’s been sort of absent lately, hasn’t he?”  
  
“Maybe… maybe it’s too much for him this time?” Greg offered slowly.  
  
“Or… he feels guilty.”  
  
They sat for a bit, quietly.  
  
Sherlock coughed.  
  
John guided him over to the sofa. Sat him down. Checked his temperature. Frowned. Re-dosed him. Wrapped himself around the too-thin, coughing man while Beethoven filled the flat.  
  
“Come on, Sherlock. Come back to us,” he murmured into the jet-black locks.  
  
*  
  
 _Caring is not an advantage._  
  
“Sherlock? What was that?” John, startled, pushed away from his friend. He had apparently dozed off for a bit on the sofa with him. Greg paused in the act of putting away the game. Sherlock’s laptop was shut and silent, and from the light filtering in through Mrs Hudson’s somewhat fussy curtains, it was getting on to late afternoon.  
  
“Caring is not an advantage,” Sherlock repeated, more clearly this time.  
  
“Sometimes it’s the only advantage, Sherlock,” John replied firmly, fighting down hysteria. He had spoken. He had actually spoken.  
  
“My—Mycroft says it’s not. He’s never wrong.” John sat up and took a look at the younger man. He was clearly not all the way “back,” by any means. His eyes were focused somewhere in the vicinity of the floor in front of the fireplace and his mouth was slack, barely forming the syllables that fell from them. His voice—that lovely, rich baritone—was rough and weak. He was obviously having difficulty breathing deeply, and he responded to John’s scrutiny with a truly terrible coughing bout.  
  
John took his pulse; his temperature. Crap. It was soaring despite the medication he had given him.  
  
“Sherlock. Sherlock! Are you with us?” Greg was kneeling in front of him.  
  
“Why would I want to be _with_ you?” the younger man muttered. And a coughing fit doubled the thin man over.  
  
“Fuck,” John muttered.  
  
“Nice bedside manner, doctor,” Greg commented. John shot him a look. The D.I. shrugged. “Sorry. What can I do?”  
  
“A cold flannel would be good. And some juice.” John was examining Sherlock’s eyes. Reaching for his stethoscope. He stretched a hand out with it.  
  
*  
  
Greg ran back in from the bathroom, where he had been wetting a flannel. John was on his back on the floor and Sherlock was attempting to stand up. “What the hell—?” he blurted out.  
  
“He’s trying to kill me!” Sherlock snarled.  
  
“No, Sherlock. That’s John—your best friend? He’s trying to help you.” Greg spoke softly and approached the sofa slowly, warily.  
  
“Of course that’s not John.” Sherlock coughed hard enough that it halted his upward progression. John had sat up but remained on the floor, a look of sheer grief on his face.  
  
“Sherlock, sit down,” Greg suggested as the thin man finally got to his feet. He was swaying. “You all right?” he asked the doctor.  
  
“Fine. I just don’t want to startle him again.”  
  
“Sherlock. Sit down!” Greg took the last two steps he needed to grasp Sherlock’s elbow.  
  
“Get your hands off me!” Sherlock thrust his own hands out, attempting to push Lestrade away, but only succeeding in pushing himself back, collapsing onto the sofa.  
  
“Sherlock!” John shouted, getting to his feet.  
  
“Keep him away!” Sherlock shrieked.  
  
The next coughing fit lasted nearly five minutes and left him gasping for breath.  
  
“Here. Have some juice,” Greg whispered. He held the bottle to Sherlock’s lips.  
  
“I’m going to give him more meds,” John murmured. He had not made a move toward them, his hands clenching in frustration.  
  
“You just gave him some an hour ago.”  
  
“Another dose each of the paracetamol and the cough medicine won’t kill him—especially compared to what he’s been taking.”  
  
“True,” the D.I. agreed. “But maybe I should give them to him. Just for now.”  
  
Sherlock was glaring at each of them in turn, his usually bright eyes watering and red. He seemed to be attempting to follow their conversation, but his frown betrayed his confusion. John retrieved the bottles of medicine and warily handed them to Greg, who sat on the coffee table facing Sherlock. He showed him the bottles.  
  
“Sherlock. You’re ill. This is just some medicine to help you feel better.” The frown deepened. “See? You’ve taken these before.”  
  
“Who is that man? Where is John? John’s my doctor,” he rasped.  
  
“That _is_ John, mate.”  
  
Sherlock shook his head so hard his matted curls tumbled around his face. “No. Not John. John won’t come over. I was an idiot and I broke the rules and I endangered the baby and now he and Mary and the baby won’t come over.” The coughing was a steady barrage now, punctuating every sentence.  
  
John could feel the tears pricking his eyes. He couldn’t stand this any longer. He walked toward the sofa cautiously. “Sherlock,” he murmured. “It’s me. It’s John. Yes, you did break the rules and yes, Mary and I are very angry with you, but that’s not going to stop me from being here for you.”  
  
“Do you think I’m an idiot now? How could you possibly be John? John doesn’t live here anymore. He lives in the suburbs and works at a very boring surgery and doesn’t mow the lawn.”  
  
“No, I don’t live here anymore, but it’s still me. And I am still your friend, and still your doctor, and I’d like you to take the medicine now. Okay?”  
  
Sherlock considered it. His bleary eyes found Greg again.  
  
“Hey, mate,” the older man offered, smiling.  
  
“You don’t live here, either, and yet here you are,” Sherlock muttered.  
  
“That’s right,” he responded patiently.  
  
“Do you want me to take that?” he whispered, indicating the two bottles of medicine that Greg still held with a dip of his head.  
  
“Yes, very much.”  
  
“And then what?”  
  
“And then I think a bath, yeah? And when you’re done, John will be here, and we’ll get some takeaway.”  
  
Sherlock considered this. “John likes _Dr Who,_ ” he finally offered.  
  
“Yeah, he does.”  
  
“John’s angry with me.”  
  
“A bit, yeah, but he’s still your best mate.”  
  
“John doesn’t live here anymore. John got married, and Mary had a baby.”  
  
“Right on all counts,” Greg soothed. He held up one of the bottles. “Come on, now. Take some of this, have a bath and a sleep, and I _promise_ that John will be here when you wake up.”  
  
Sherlock tried to grumble, but it ended in a cough. “Come on. It always makes you feel better,” Greg pointed out. Sherlock mused on this for a few seconds, picking at the knee of his pyjama bottoms. Finally, with a sigh, he pointed at the bottles and nodded.  
  
Greg dosed him quickly, then steadied him as they headed through the flat to the bathroom, the thin man’s dressing gown sliding off his shoulders to the floor as they went.  
  
John Watson sat at the acid- and flame-scarred kitchen table in 221B Baker Street. He wanted to shout—to scream—to pound his fists on the table—to pound his head on the table—to sob.  
  
*  
  
Instead, after a few minutes, John took a deep breath, pushed himself up from the table, and set about tidying up a bit. He opened the windows and breathed in—well, it was fresher air than what was in the flat even if it was Baker Street and therefore more exhaust fumes than anything. Speedy’s sent up nice smells, though. He swiftly picked up everything that didn’t belong on the floor, tossing some books randomly back on the shelves, throwing some files into a drawer, and re-establishing the skull on the mantelpiece. He picked up the dressing gown Sherlock had slid off. Sniffing it, he grimaced and tossed it toward the door; he would do laundry in a bit. He knew that he would certainly be washing what Sherlock was removing right now.  
  
He folded the various blankets that were strewn all over, draping them neatly over the chairs. He vigorously (all right, almost savagely) beat all the chair cushions back into shape, sending clouds of dust up. He replaced the Union Jack pillow he considered “his” on his chair, patting it affectionately. Finally he tackled the sofa. He would have to borrow some disinfectant spray from Mrs Hudson, he realized. He yanked at the cushions, trying to plump them up a bit.  
  
And something caught his eye. He reached out for it carefully—something was stuck between the back of the sofa and the seat cushion.  
  
It was Sherlock’s mobile.  
  
Without thinking about it, he swept his thumb across it and brought up Sherlock’s familiar, cryptically-tagged contact list. It always amused him. Some listings made perfect sense—Lestrade was “Scotland Yard” and Angelo was “Housebreaker Pasta.” Molly, John knew, came up as “Bart Mortuary.” Others were more personal. Irene Adler was still in as “The Woman.” There were “Them” (his parents), “Ninjamum” (Mary), someone—a carpenter, maybe?—tagged “Shelves,” and one (which made him frown in puzzlement) that simply said “Cupid.” John’s favourite was Mrs Hudson, who appeared as “Not My Housekeeper.” And some people thought Sherlock didn’t have a sense of humour.  
  
And there were more mysterious entries—some just a single letter or two: “M,” “MH,” “Q,” and the intriguing “Seven.”  
  
He realized that he hadn’t found his own entry. He scrolled through the list again. There was one called “The Doctor,” but that wasn’t it. Then he spotted it, and an affectionate smile crept across his face.  
  
John’s number was listed under “My Blogger.”  
  
John sighed and started digging for the mobile’s charger. It was nearly dead.  
  
*  
  
Down the hall, Lestrade was doing his best to tidy up as well. Sherlock was seated on the closed lid of the toilet, watching blearily as the water ran into the spacious old tub. Lestrade was digging out two clean towels (“God, Sherlock, how much do these cost?” he had murmured in admiration, running his hands along the almost impossibly soft surfaces).  
  
Receiving no answer, he dropped them onto the sink and rolled up his sleeves. He plunged a hand into the water. “Perfect. All right. That lot’s coming off,” he nodded at the younger man.  
  
Sherlock did an admirable job of attempting to get his t-shirt off by himself. Lestrade patiently untangled him and dropped it to the floor. Then Sherlock ran his long fingers down and tried to slide off his pyjama bottoms.  
  
“I think that would work better if you stood up first,” the D.I. recommended drily. Sherlock frowned in confusion. “Oh for Pete’s sake. Come on. Up you get,” the older man offered, extending his hands.  
  
There. Finally. Filthy bottoms off. One shaking, horribly thin man over the edge of the tub and seated in the warm water. Greg took one of the towels and, folding it, placed it so it would cushion Sherlock’s shoulders as he lay back with a sigh of contentment. “Better?” he asked unnecessarily. Sherlock nodded, his eyes shut. “Don’t fall asleep. You, mate, are disgusting. Let’s get you cleaned up and into something comfortable and then you can have a sleep, yeah?”  
  
Lestrade sighed, too, but not with contentment, as he picked up a flannel and poured what appeared to be an expensive shower gel onto it. _This must be what washing clothes on a washboard feels like,_ he reflected to himself as he ran the warm, sudsy cloth over Sherlock’s far-too-prominent ribs. He hadn’t been this thin in years, the older man recognized sadly. Not since they first met, when Sherlock was a strung-out crime-scene junkie… oh. Right. Well, the scars had certainly multiplied since then. _Not exactly a change for the better,_ he told himself.  
  
He gently lifted up one of Sherlock’s track-marked arms and continued scrubbing, checking Sherlock’s face and breathing occasionally. It wouldn’t be the first time he had fallen asleep in the tub. What he and John had been talking about—it seemed ages ago—the places where Sherlock felt safe? The bath definitely was one of them. Interesting, that. He was no idiot (despite the detective’s protestations). He knew what that meant. For whatever reason, the depraved bastard who had abused the boy beyond what any of them had realized until now had avoided the bathtub. Possibly the bathroom entirely, now that he thought about it, starting on Sherlock’s other arm.  
  
Sherlock never had a problem with being in there at all. Even when it wasn’t pretty (and stab wounds from nasty cornered criminals, withdrawal, a weak stomach in general, and an odd predilection for entrails in buckets made it “not pretty” most of the time), Sherlock obviously felt just fine with it.  
  
Likewise the kitchen—not for cooking, of course, because that might entail eating—but he had no qualms about filling the sink, table, countertops, and fridge with decidedly unhygienic…  
  
Oh! Maybe that was it. Lestrade considered what he had observed the few times he had met Mycroft. The fastidious suits. Manicured nails. Overt distaste bordering on disgust for whatever Sherlock had been rolling in at the most recent crime scene. Never had seen him shake hands with anyone. Was Mycroft slightly (or perhaps more than slightly) germaphobic? And was it a trait he had inherited from his father?  
  
And had Sherlock, at a very early age (which wouldn’t surprise him in the slightest), figured out that dirt and germs were an excellent way of keeping the man away from him?  
  
He re-soaped the flannel and moved on to the ridiculously long legs and rather enormous feet.  
  
*  
  
John listened at the bathroom door. He could hear Lestrade’s voice, pitched low, but couldn’t discern what he was saying. It probably wasn’t anything meaningful; both of them were now in the habit of basically babbling to Sherlock about pretty much anything at times. The sound of their voices seemed enough to keep him calm, even if he wasn’t paying the least bit of attention to what they were saying.  
  
John thought about Sherlock murmuring the periodic table of elements into his daughter’s hair. No, that was different. That actually did mean something, and sometimes he couldn’t get over the fact that the man adored the baby so much. It made more sense, now, though. In a way, perhaps, Sherlock saw her as a second chance—a chance to nurture and love and protect an innocent, helpless human being.  
  
The doctor went into Sherlock’s bedroom. It wasn’t that bad; Mrs Hudson had changed the linens not too long ago. John scooped up bits of clothing to wash and dumped them in the hall, then went back in and picked up the various books and other items that had landed on the floor. He looked at the full glass of water on the bedside table and turned away from it, the impact like a physical pain in his chest.  
  
He moved back into the sitting room, glancing around. It looked much better, and the fresh air was a welcome change. He fell heavily into his chair and ran his hand over his face.  
  
*  
  
“All right, Sunshine. Much better.” Sherlock scowled at the older man. Greg grinned at the expression—dark and overly dramatic and very _Sherlock._ “What? Oh, come on. I used to call you that all the time.”  
  
“I don’t remember that,” Sherlock frowned.  
  
“I’m not surprised. Never mind. How about a shave?”  
  
“That would be nice, but I don’t think…”  
  
“No, no. I’ll do it. That is, if it’s all right.”  
  
Sherlock considered it for a few seconds.  
  
“Can’t John do it when he comes back?”  
  
“Brat. I’m no surgeon but I can manage this.” He turned and dug Sherlock’s shaving gear out, going out to the kitchen, where John had stashed Sherlock’s razors. He had Sherlock lean back on the towel and carefully began to lather his knife-sharp jaw.  
  
“Not bad,” Sherlock admitted when he was done, one shaking hand reaching up to stroke his own cheek.  
  
“I’ve had practice,” the silver-haired man admitted, rinsing and drying his hands in the sink and putting the shaving gear away (except for the razor; he popped that into his pocket). Sherlock, who had let his eyes drift shut, opened them again slowly. Greg almost shivered as those eyes, even dimmed by illness, raked over him with the precision of a scalpel.  
  
“Your father,” Sherlock finally said carefully, as if he wasn’t sure of his own deduction.  
  
“Yeah. When the Parkinson’s got too bad. He had people in the home to shave him and all that, of course, but sometimes I’d do for him.”  
  
“He died while I was… away.”  
  
“Yeah.”  
  
“I’m… sorry. I didn’t know.”  
  
“I never mentioned it,” the D.I. responded logically.  
  
“I should have seen it.” Sherlock’s tone was dark.  
  
“You probably did; just didn’t… doesn’t matter. Come on. Up and out. Time for a sleep.”  
  
*  
  
Lestrade stumbled into the room and slumped into the chair opposite.  
  
“All done?” John asked unnecessarily.  
  
“Clean, cooled down a bit, and sound asleep. I couldn’t get him into anything—clothes, I mean, but he’s under the sheet.” John nodded in appreciation. “God, John, I’m sorry,” he muttered in response. John frowned. “I mean, about before. When he didn’t recognize you.”  
  
“It was the fever,” John said, so quietly Greg could barely hear him.  
  
“Still…”  
  
“Yeah.”  
  
“Tea?” Greg muttered.  
  
“I was thinking an herbal soother…” They both smiled grimly.   
  
“And then a curry?” Greg offered.  
  
“Yeah. Hopefully he’ll sleep for a few hours; when he wakes up we can get something. At least he’s not coughing so much now.” Greg had left the door to Sherlock’s bedroom open so they could listen for any sounds of distress.  
  
“You’re going to be checking on him every fifteen minutes anyway, aren’t you?” the D.I. stated.  
  
“Of course I am,” the doctor replied.  
  
And he did. Sherlock seemed to be sound asleep. John checked his temperature, and it was indeed starting to go down. Good. He placed a wet flannel on his head and replaced it a few times, anyway.  
  
His estimate of a few hours of sleep was off a bit; Sherlock only stayed down for about an hour. Still, it was an hour of sleep he hadn’t gotten the night before, and the medications seemed to be helping. He was actually on his way to check on the younger man again when he heard it.  
  
 _It wasn’t me that upset her, Mycroft._  
  
He ran down the short hallway. Sherlock was sitting up, eyes partially open.  
  
“Sherlock. Sherlock! Wake up. It’s John. Wake up now.”  
  
Sherlock’s eyes fluttered shut and he fell back against the pillows, coughing. John sat on the bed next to him. He found the still-damp flannel and used it to gently wipe his friend’s face, his heart breaking to feel how prominent his cheekbones were.  
  
“John?” Sherlock rasped. His eyes opened slowly.  
  
“Yeah. Right here.”  
  
“Was… I thought… was Mycroft here?”  
  
“No. Your fever’s been really high. I think you were confused for a bit.”  
  
“Someone else was here, though.” He slowly shifted himself to sit more upright.  
  
“Have some water,” John instructed, taking the glass from the bedside table and holding it to his lips. Sherlock flinched and turned his head. “Wh… oh! Sorry.” John took a sip and offered it to Sherlock again, who accepted it this time, taking a few small sips. “Yes. Greg’s still here. We were just going to get a curry for dinner. Want some?” Sherlock tried waving his hand in a dismissing motion, but it was shaking so badly he nearly hit John. “You need to eat,” the doctor said firmly. “Stay in bed until we get the food sorted, all right?”  
  
Sherlock frowned. He was clearly not processing anything very quickly. “No, not Lestrade. Someone else was here. You weren’t, and someone else was, and Lestrade told me that you would be here when I woke up.”  
  
“And here I am,” John smiled sadly at him.  
  
“Why _are_ you here? Aren’t you angry at me?”  
  
“A bit, yeah, but I’m your friend and your doctor and so here I am, and I’m not going anywhere until you’re better. Now, how about some lamb and rice?”  
  
*  
  
Lestrade opened the last of the containers. After getting him into some clothes, making a shaky trip to the loo, and walking him into the sitting room, they had decided that Sherlock wasn’t going to manage sitting at the kitchen table. They propped him up on the sofa instead. His fever had gone down but he was walking and moving slowly; dreamily. Greg sat next to him and began the food-tasting ritual. Sherlock watched him blearily, but didn’t object when Greg finally, gently fed him a forkful of rice. “Chew. Swallow,” he instructed.  
  
It took a long time to feed him a very small amount, but neither of them wanted to push him to eat more than he could manage.  
  
And then he was exhausted, sliding back into sleep without protest where he sat. Greg tidied up. They found something mindless on telly, watching numbly as they counted down to the next dose of meds.  
  
 _All hearts are broken._  
  
“What was that?” Greg asked. John had gone up into his old bedroom to call his wife and lie down for a bit, and Greg had switched off the telly and found an interesting book.  
  
“I didn’t say anything,” the younger man snarled, rubbing his shaking hands across his eyes and struggling to sit upright.  
  
“If you say so. You’re about due for some more meds.”  
  
“I want a cigarette.”  
  
“Well, you’re not getting one. I’ll give you a new patch, though.”  
  
Sherlock rolled his eyes and extended his arm. “Where’s John?” he asked once the new patch was applied.  
  
“Up in his room, talking to Mary.”  
  
“He should be home with her. And the baby.”  
  
“It’s fine, Sherlock.”  
  
“No. No. It’s not fine! He shouldn’t be here. He should be with his family and you should be at work.”  
  
Greg was growing concerned. Sherlock was becoming agitated. He had leaned forward and was tearing his fingers through his tangled hair, yanking at it in frustration.  
  
“Did I… did I hurt him? Earlier. I… I pushed him. That was him, wasn’t it? I thought… wanted to… oh God!”  
  
“Sherlock! It’s all right. It’s fine. You didn’t hurt him. I promise.”  
  
“No. No! NO!” Sherlock shouted. He started coughing, tears streaming down his cheeks. John ran down the stairs and grabbed his shoulders.  
  
“Sherlock, it’s all right. Calm down. I’m here. Breathe. Come on. Shhh. It’s all right. I’m fine. You were just confused. You didn’t hurt me.”  
  
“I could have!”  
  
“I sincerely doubt that right now. Calm down. Greg, can you--” He was already there with a fresh glass of water. “Thank you. Sherlock, here. Try to drink some of that.” He held the glass toward the man encouragingly. Sherlock stared at it and shook his head vigorously. “All right. I’ll help. Here.” John gently reached out and grasped Sherlock’s hand, tugging it up and trying to get him to help hold it.  
  
Sherlock pulled his hand away from the glass as if he had been burned.  
  
John sighed and carefully raised the glass to the young man’s lips.  
  
Sherlock pulled back as far as he could into the back of the sofa, his hand over his mouth, shaking his head and moaning—not in pain or illness, John realized, but in fear.  
  
John sighed and moved the glass away from Sherlock’s face. His dark eyes piercing, he raised the glass to his own lips and deliberately took a sip. Sherlock watched him, mesmerized. He raised the glass to Sherlock’s lips, and the pale man began drinking from it, almost greedily.  
  
“Slow down,” he murmured, tipping the glass back for a second. “Easy.”  
  
John handed the almost-empty glass back to Greg, who had been watching intently. He glanced up at him. “Could you grab his meds for me, please?” he asked, his voice low and soft. Greg nodded and went to get them.  
  
“John, what’s wrong with me?” Sherlock rasped.  
  
It was time.


	16. Clearly Now

“All right, yeah. It’s time to talk.”  
  
John had patiently given him the liquid medications for the fever and the cough. Then he got up and turned his chair so it faced the sofa and sat down again heavily. Greg did likewise with Sherlock’s chair. Sherlock was still sitting up, his arms now wrapped around his knees, his chin on them. “All right, Sherlock. Let’s start with right here and now. With the glass of water,” John started after clearing his throat. “What were you feeling when I tried to hand it to you?”  
  
“Feelings? Really, John?”  
  
“Yes. Feelings, Sherlock. What were you _feeling_ when I tried to hand you the glass of water?”  
  
Sherlock tried rolling his eyes. And then he froze. His expression changed. He frowned, looking genuinely puzzled. “I—” he started. Stopped. Coughed. Tried again. His voice was low and unsteady. “I felt…frightened.”  
  
“Frightened of what?”  
  
“Of the glass.”  
  
“Good. And what about when I tried to get you to drink? What were you feeling then?”  
  
Sherlock considered. “Sick. I felt like I was going to be sick.”  
  
“Why?”  
  
“Drinking the water. If I drank the water, it would make me ill.”  
  
“But that changed, didn’t it?” John’s voice was steady.  
  
“Yes.”  
  
“When?”  
  
“When you… drank from it first.”  
  
“And that made it safe.” It was a statement, not a question.  
  
Sherlock nodded in confirmation, his eyes dropping to his feet.  
  
“Sherlock, why would you think that drinking a glass of water would make you sick?” Greg asked gently.  
  
“I don’t know.” The response was quick.  
  
“Actually, yeah, I think you do. It’s more than the water, isn’t it?” Sherlock didn’t respond to the D.I., but John nodded at the older man in encouragement. “Sherlock, what did I do when we got our curry before?”  
  
“You…” Sherlock considered for a second. “You opened everything. All the containers.”  
  
“Where?”  
  
“On the coffee table; what does it matter?”  
  
“And were you watching?”  
  
“You know I was,” Sherlock shot back.  
  
“And then what did I do?”  
  
“You ate.”  
  
“I ate what?” Greg was starting feel like he was dragging something very heavy through mud.  
  
“You ate… everything. One bite of everything.”  
  
“And then what happened?” Greg was grateful for his professional training in interrogations.  
  
“You made me eat.” Sherlock unconsciously rubbed his lips with shaking fingertips.  
  
“Good job. Yeah. You ate. Sherlock, are you aware that that’s the only way anyone’s been able to get you to eat for ages?”  
  
“What?” Sherlock sounded completely perplexed.  
  
“That’s right,” John confirmed. “For weeks now. You’ll only eat if the food is prepared or unsealed in front of you and if someone you trust has some first.”  
  
“You’re mad!”  
  
“Others can confirm it,” Greg said gently. “Mrs Hudson. Mary.”  
  
Sherlock considered this for a moment, his light eyes searching between the two grim faces across from him. “All right,” he said finally.  
  
“And why do you think that is?” John pressed.  
  
“How should I know?” Sherlock snapped. “I’ve got a headache.”  
  
“I’m sorry to hear that, because you need to think right now. Come on, Sherlock. Look. If a client came to you saying he had developed these… behaviors… what would you deduce?”  
  
Sherlock’s face brightened slightly. Greg nodded at John’s change of tactic. Yes. Put him at ease. Get him into his element. Brilliant, John.  
  
“About the sealed food, the food testing… obviously he’s developed a fear of being poisoned.” The words rolled out of his mouth quickly. And then the detective’s face fell.  
  
“All right. What about not touching the glass?” Greg interjected quickly, wanting to keep things moving. “You’ve done that before.” Sherlock stared at him in disbelief. “You have. For years. When you’re… not yourself. You won’t touch a glass of water. Bottles are fine. Mugs are fine. Milk in a glass is fine. Why would—” he stopped briefly to make sure he got the language right. “Why would _someone_ have an aversion to a drinking glass full of water?”  
  
“It could be anything.”  
  
“No. You know. Say it,” The grey-haired man pressed.  
  
“Specifically a glass of water?” he demanded. The D.I. nodded. Sherlock sighed. “I suppose—” he stopped and got a far-away look in his eyes. “I suppose it could be that the client had broken a glass of water. And something bad had happened.”  
  
“Sherlock,” John sighed, “what bad thing happened with a broken drinking glass?”  
  
When he started speaking again, it was slow. Dream-like. Distant. Nothing like Sherlock at all. “The client dropped a glass of water. At dinner. It broke. It made a mess. There was water and broken glass on the floor of the dining room. The client was clumsy and dull and made a mess right before dinner.”  
  
“And what happened to… the client?” Greg’s throat was tight.  
  
“His father made him pick up the glass and select the largest piece.”  
  
John and Greg exchanged anguished looks. Sherlock appeared to be completely oblivious to them.  
  
“And his father took the piece of glass. It was very sharp.”  
  
John moaned.  
  
“And he made the client pull up his shirt and pull down his trousers and pants.”  
  
Greg put a hand over his mouth.  
  
“And he made a mark. On the boy’s… on the client’s leg. With the broken glass. He made a mark for every glass and dish the boy had broken.” Sherlock leaned against the back of the sofa. He slowly rucked up his t-shirt and pulled his pyjama bottoms down, exposing the healing cuts on his abdomen and thighs. “John,” he said thoughtfully, “where did these come from?”  
  
“You did them yourself,” John muttered, closing his eyes.  
  
“Why?”  
  
“For God’s sake, Sherlock, figure it out!” John suddenly pushed himself out of his chair, turning to face the mantelpiece, his arms held tightly to his sides, his hands in fists.  
  
Sherlock stared at him. For a moment, he looked exactly like he did when he hit a bump in a case—baffled, his thoughts churning, considering, turning the evidence over and over.  
  
And then it hit him.  
  
And then he was spilling out his deductions—the low, familiar voice rattling out of a constricted and too-thin chest, punctuated by a multitude of coughs.  
  
Greg didn’t want to listen to him; didn’t want to hear him.  
  
“He dropped the glass of water. He didn’t mean to. He was always being clumsy. And the glass was very sharp. It didn’t even really hurt at first. You can perform surgery with broken glass. A stone, even—the edge of a hand-struck flint tool has been found to be just as sharp as a modern scalpel. But he didn’t like it when he got blood on his clothes, either. He was wicked and thoughtless and careless. That meant a punishment, too. That meant soaking them in water. You use cold water to get blood out of clothing. So many idiots don’t know that and they use hot water and well it does often make my job easier even Anderson could spot blood that’s essentially been cooked into the fabric and the tub for soaking my clothes is outdoors and it’s so very cold I can’t feel my legs I suppose that’s a good thing because they’re still bleeding and I can’t get the blood out of my clothes because my hands are cold and I keep dropping the soap and I can’t go back inside and get dressed until they’re clean and I can’t feel the broken glass in the tub because my hands are numb and now the water’s all bloody so my clothes will never be clean but it’s dark so I can’t see it and I just want to go inside.“  
  
Greg wasn’t sure which direction to go as Sherlock suddenly crumbled to the floor and John spun around and ran out of the room.  
  
“All right. Shush now. Come on, Sherlock. Back up; here we go,” Greg murmured as he attempted to get the coughing man back onto the sofa. “John? John!” The D.I. raised his healthy voice over the coughs as he practically picked Sherlock up and deposited him on the sofa. The overly-thin man was shaking so hard he wasn’t sure that he’d actually stay on it. “JOHN!”  
  
The doctor stumbled back into the room, drying his face with a towel. “Sorry,” he muttered into it. He was grey.  
  
Greg helped John sit back in his chair. He glanced back over at Sherlock. He was staring at John, horrified. “Did I make him sick?” he gasped. “I did, didn’t I? Why? What was I saying?” He attempted to stand up.  
  
“No. No, Sherlock. I’m all right,” John spit out. “Don’t try…”  
  
Sherlock fell over, catching his side on the coffee table.  
  
“Shit,” Greg muttered, patting John on the shoulder before going over and getting Sherlock back onto the sofa again. He stood back, his arms crossed tightly across his chest, his silver head swiveling between the doctor and the detective. “All right,” he said firmly. “That’s about enough of this.”  
  
Both men looked at him, confusion on their faces.  
  
“You,” he demanded, pointing to John, “stay in that chair. And you,” and now he pointed at Sherlock. “You… God, Sherlock. Don’t try to get up again. I’m going to…” And his voice broke. He paused and cleared his throat, then ran his hand through his hair. Took a deep breath, and said firmly, “I am going to make tea.”  
  
“Well, that will solve _everything,_ ” John muttered.  
  
Greg glared at him and continued. “I am going to make tea. And then we are all going to talk.”  
  
*  
  
John had defied Greg’s command. He couldn’t help himself. He had crept over to his friend, glancing over his shoulder toward the kitchen, where Greg was slamming mugs and the kettle and anything else he could slam loudly and angrily onto the counter.  
  
Sherlock was sitting up, elbows on his knees, his head in his hands, fingers buried in his tangled hair. John sat down next to him. “Hey,” he whispered. Sherlock moaned in response. “It’s all right. I’m fine. I just needed a minute.”  
  
“I made you sick,” he mumbled. “I made you sick and I don’t even… I don’t even know what I said!”  
  
“What do you mean?”  
  
“What was I saying? I don’t know. I honestly don’t know.” And Sherlock was silenced by a series of harsh, deep coughs.  
  
John was speechless at this. He simply did not know what to say or do next. This was so far beyond what he had even imagined. The stories—the details—of the abuse were bad enough, but the fact that Sherlock, even when articulating them, was still blocking them out, was a seemingly insurmountable wall. He had thought that once Sherlock started talking, they could address the issues head-on, but it was so much harder than that.  
  
He was failing one of the most brilliant minds in the country—and his best friend.  
  
It had to end.  
  
It was going to end.  
  
So then John Watson, MD and ex-army captain, pulled on every bit of strength he had. He sat up and squared his shoulders. He took a deep breath. “All right,” he spat out sharply. “All right. Sherlock, listen to me. We are going to fix this, and it’s going to have to be head on. Greg, get in here!” The D.I. came in carrying three mugs of tea. His expression was dark. “Do you have the original file?” he demanded.  
  
“Yeah. It’s out in my car,” the silver-haired man replied hesitantly. “Why?”  
  
“Go get it.”  
  
“What?!” He slammed the mugs down. “Are you mad?”  
  
“Maybe… actually, very likely, yes. But he’s not getting any closer to what’s going on this way.”  
  
“What do you have in mind?” he asked carefully.  
  
“What is he?”  
  
“What?”  
  
“Sherlock, what are you? What do you do?”  
  
“I’m… I’m a consulting detective. I solve… things. Puzzles. Mysteries.”  
  
John nodded emphatically. “And you do it brilliantly, don’t you?”  
  
“I used to.” Sherlock, trying to talk around coughing, sounded hesitant—miserable—beaten.  
  
“Nope. You are still brilliant, and you’re going to prove that to yourself and to us by solving your own puzzle. Greg, go get the file.”  
  
*  
  
Sherlock sat at his desk. After some fiddling with mugs he had been convinced to drink some of his tea. He was fidgeting with the mug now, running his fingers along the handle. Not looking at either of the other two men in the room.  
  
A file sat in front of him on the desk. It was closed. It had been put there five minutes earlier.  
  
John, who was sitting in his ridiculously soft, old chair with his own mug of tea, cleared his throat and stared pointedly at the file. Greg leaned against the door to the kitchen. He was sipping his tea rather determinedly, as if he had suddenly decided that being very British was a good thing. Stiff upper lip and all that. Keep calm and carry on.  
  
Sherlock sighed and opened the file with two long fingers.  
  
It was very quiet in the flat for a while. For a long while. The only sound was the flipping of papers and photos as the consulting detective went through the file carefully.  
  
And then he broke the silence. He flipped the file closed again. He looked—a bit wildly—around. Caught sight of them. Stood up—supporting himself heavily on the desk.  
  
“No,” he said quietly, determinedly.  
  
“No, what?” John asked calmly.  
  
“No. No, no, no nononono get out get out get out GET OUT!”  
  
And moving surprisingly quickly for a man as ill as he was, Sherlock Holmes stormed past them both and into his bedroom. The door slammed and—John knew they would hear this—the lock clicked.  
  
Greg’s eyes were wide and alarmed. He made a move to follow the younger man. John held up his hand. “It’s all right,” he said in a voice broken with emotion. “I’ve picked that lock a hundred times.”  
  
As Greg moved toward the door, John went over to the desk and closed the file, then opened a drawer and took something out, joining the D.I. to stand just outside Sherlock’s bedroom. And they were both very quiet then.  
  
The sounds of rage took only a few minutes to start. It sounded like every bit of furniture was being thrown against the walls; the door. John in particular seemed very intent on listening. Greg gave him an inquiring look but John shook his head. “Let him,” he whispered. “He needs to.”  
  
It was when they heard the glass shattering that John bent to the lock, popping it with a swiftness borne of experience.  
  
Afterward Greg recalled the entire scene in slow motion. John had dropped whatever he had used to open the door (a letter opener, it turned out) and went immediately for Sherlock. Greg gaped. There was shattered glass everywhere, and Sherlock was standing shakily, panting, in front of an image of the periodic table of elements.  
  
“Okay. Okay. It’s okay, Sherlock. Come on, now. Come with us. We’ll get this cleaned up. No, don’t touch it. Come on… okay! I’ve got you. I’ve got you.”  
  
The murmurs of assurance flowed out of the man like hot water into a bath—soothing and warm and lovely. It was the image that stuck with Greg, though. Because as John was issuing a proverbial wall of calm support, he was also firmly, deftly removing a large shard of glass from his best friend’s shaking hand.  
  
“I need you to come back out, now,” John said firmly, calmly. No wonder he had been such an amazing soldier, Greg thought dazedly. Not that he would have been any slouch, he admitted later, but John had not reacted—he had _anticipated_. He clearly knew Sherlock better.  
  
But for now, all that mattered was that they had intervened in time.  
  
And now they were back in the sitting room, and he was looking at his watch and digging through the kitchen for a cup (or mug or anything but a glass) for water and Sherlock’s medicine while John got the man seated on the sofa, rubbing his back as he doubled over, coughing. “It’s all right, Sherlock,” murmured the doctor, rubbing soothing circles on his back. Meds first. “Good job, mate,” John whispered into his temple as he held the small plastic cup of viscous liquid up to the detective’s lips. “You always feel better after you get this in you.”  
  
Then the water. Lestrade did this himself, slightly chagrined that he felt—did he really?—a bit jealous.  
  
There was a tentative tap at the door. Mrs Hudson stood there, looking anxious. Not that she had looked anything different for weeks now. “I heard a crash,” she commented quietly.  
  
“It’s all right. Bit of an accident, but we’ll get it cleaned up,” John replied, never taking his eyes off his friend.  
  
“Can I get you anything?” she asked hesitantly, and John finally turned toward her. He realized that despite her usual pattern of coming up, puttering around, making tea and biscuits, and generally being almost underfoot, she had made herself rather scarce lately. He gazed at her soft, lined face deeply, and there, he saw it. Not anxiety or anger or even fear. What he saw was sadness.  
  
The same sadness that he saw in Greg’s eyes.  
  
And, if he bothered to take a minute to look in the mirror, in his own.  
  
“It’s late,” he observed quietly.  
  
She shook her head in dismissal. “Oh, I’m up anyway. I was just on the phone with an old friend from Florida. Time difference. How about some tea and biscuits?”  
  
“That would be lovely, Mrs Hudson.” The voice startled all three of them. Raw from coughing, shouting, and crying, it hardly sounded like Sherlock at all.  
  
“Oh, Sherlock! Of course. I’ve got your favorites,” she responded in a perfectly normal tone, bouncing back from her shock much more quickly that John would have credited her with. She even managed a smile before turning and going back down to 221A.  
  
“I’ll go help her with the tray,” Greg offered, walking down a bit dazedly.  
  
John turned to Sherlock, who, having apparently exhausted his reserves with his one short sentence, was now leaning back, his head tipped onto the sofa back, staring at the ceiling.  
  
“Sherlock,” John attempted. It came out as a squeak. He cleared his throat impatiently and tried again. “Hey. You. Are you in there?”  
  
“Mmmm.”  
  
“All right. Listen. I think that maybe it’s better that we don’t talk any more tonight. We’ll have a nice brew-up and then straight to bed, yeah? I think it’d be better if we started fresh in the morning.”  
  
Sherlock sat up and nodded slowly.  
  
They sat in silence for a few minutes. Finally, they heard Mrs Hudson and Greg making their way back up the stairs.  
  
“John,” Sherlock almost whispered.  
  
“Yeah, mate?”  
  
“Will you… will you help me clean up the glass?”  
  
“Wh…? Yeah. No. I’ll do it. Or Greg. Don’t worry about it.” John stared at him in astonishment.  
  
“But it’s my mess. I should clean it up.”  
  
“No. Just… no. Not another word.” John turned away so Sherlock couldn’t see his expression.  
  
*  
  
And despite the late hour, they thoroughly enjoyed their tea and Mrs Hudson’s lovely biscuits. Neither of them had to be reminded to try everything before Sherlock would eat—they were happy to oblige, and they were both thrilled when Sherlock had two of the confections and half a cup of hot herbal tea. Mrs Hudson nattered on about her friend in Florida for a bit. John took the distraction as an opportunity to quietly slip into Sherlock’s bedroom, cleaning up the glass swiftly and thoroughly. Finally, he took the ruined image of the periodic table of elements down from the wall and slid it under the bed.  
  
He rejoined the group as Sherlock began to fade. He curled up on the sofa, nearly kicking the newly-seated John off.  
  
“Oi! Sherlock!” the doctor protested, shoving at the intrusive bare feet.  
  
Greg giggled. It was the most normal any of them had felt in ages, and he wanted it to feel like this forever. And then he sobered. He knew it wouldn’t. He knew it _couldn’t._ “All right. Time for little consulting detectives to be in bed,” he stated firmly. He put down his empty cup and stood, reaching out a hand for the younger man. Sherlock observed him blearily, then allowed himself to be pulled up and walked to his bedroom. “I’ll bring the tea things down in the morning, Mrs H,” Greg called over his shoulder.  
  
“Thank you, dear,” she called out, rising and making her way carefully to the stairs. “Good night, boys,” she called out.  
  
“Good night, and thank you,” John replied. He sighed as he tidied up. It was a deep sigh.  
  
*  
  
“Why are _we_ doing this, John? Where’s his family? Where the fuck is Mycroft?” Lestrade rasped out, stumbling out of the bedroom. He was close to falling down from the mental and physical exhaustion, grateful that the thin man had fallen asleep essentially the second his head hit the pillow.  
  
“Good question.” John dug his mobile out—it had somehow landed under his chair at some point—and stabbed at it. Despite the late hour, it was answered instantly.  
  
“Yes, doctor?” John’s stomach clenched at the plummy tone of the man’s voice.  
  
“Why aren’t you here?” John asked, simply.  
  
“John, I’m going to send you something that will answer your question.”  
  
Mycroft sent John a photograph, and when he opened it, his clenched stomach was suddenly in his throat. “Oh, God,” he gasped.  
  
“What’s wrong?” Greg was at his side in an instant, squinting down at the mobile’s screen. “Oh, God,” he echoed. He fell heavily into Sherlock’s chair, his face cradled in his hand.  
  
It was an image of Stafford Holmes. At least, according to the caption, it was.  
  
And if it hadn’t been for the fifteen-years-out-of-style clothing and haircut, it could have been a photo of Mycroft taken that very day.  
  
John’s mobile chimed. It was a text message this time. Three words.  
  
 _Do you see? MH_  
  
“Yeah, I see,” he said bitterly.  
  
They sat in silence for a while.  
  
Finally, the silence was punctuated with the now painfully familiar coughing. John got up numbly to check on him. “I’ll… I’m going to stay with him,” he finally stammered.  
  
Greg nodded, then pointed up to the ceiling. He’d kip upstairs until they needed him.  
  
It was a long, long night.  
  



	17. The Dim Light of the Stars

John never thought he’d admit it, but right now he missed Sherlock coughing. Because when he was coughing, he had not been speaking; and the coughing was so much easier to deal with than the shouting. The ranting.  
  
John had not wanted to do it, but the severity of Sherlock’s cough overnight had finally forced him to get him something stronger than the generic cough syrup obligingly purchased by Mrs Hudson. Yes, he was perfectly aware that giving the man narcotics was idiotic, thank you very much, he had snarled at his wife when she, quite reasonably, brought up that minor objection. _And if you can think of another way to get him to stop other than smothering him with a pillow, I would be delighted to try it,_ he had added, hitting ‘end call’ with an angry stab. He had immediately regretted his words and called her back to apologize, but she said she was already on her way to the surgery to get what he needed.  
  
“You’re going to come here?” he asked, dumbfounded and more than a little concerned.  
  
“I want to see him. I’m worried sick about him, and I miss you.”  
  
“What about the baby?”  
  
“I can leave her with Mrs Whitney.”  
  
“I’d like to see her.”  
  
“Then come home. No. I’m sorry. That wasn’t fair. I’ll be there as soon as I can.”  
  
“Can you bring a change of…?”  
  
“I’ve got your bag packed already.”  
  
*  
  
It had been a dreadful night, which surprised neither of them at all. Sherlock’s fever had predictably gone up, and his coughing was so severe that he was sick again. John, who was curled up on the big bed with him, had had the foresight to put a towel on the mattress, and Greg had appeared from upstairs, swiftly changing Sherlock’s shirt while John got him a wet flannel and gently wiped his face. Sherlock hadn’t been completely awake at any point during this, and after everything was cleaned up, he drifted off again fairly easily.  
  
The nightmares started up later. John, who had crashed again soon after the earlier incident, groaned and tried to rouse himself, cursing at the hour and his exhaustion. Once again, Greg appeared as the doctor attempted to soothe his friend.  
  
It was frightening how predictable the nightmares had become, he reflected. This evening they were treated to a horrific one-sided conversation involving a young Sherlock and an unfortunate and messy incident during a long car ride—a perfectly common and normal part of childhood for most children, John reflected sadly. Not pleasant for anyone involved, of course, but nothing that necessitated the retaliation of the foul-minded, evil man Sherlock had called ‘Father.’  
  
After they had convinced Sherlock that he was not actually in a car and that going back to sleep was the best solution for his imagined motion sickness, Greg had patted John on the shoulder and jerked his thumb over his shoulder, and John gratefully rose and allowed the man to take his place on the bed. He dragged himself up the stairs to his old bedroom and collapsed on the bed.  
  
It was now midmorning. Despite the exhaustion and interrupted night, John had woken fairly early and called Mary, explaining to her the need for the stronger medicine. Now he sat at the kitchen table watching Greg scramble some eggs while he buttered several slices of toast. Sherlock was—finally—sleeping soundly. They had been discussing their strategy for the day while gulping down steaming hot coffee and glancing covertly at the bags under each other’s eyes.  
  
Strategy. Sure. John had preferred invading Afghanistan. It had been easier.  
  
“So this is—what’s it called—repressed memories?” Lestrade asked.  
  
“ _Dissociative amnesia_ is a more accurate phrase, but yeah,” John sighed. “I’ve been doing research.”  
  
“I imagine you have,” the D.I. mumbled miserably. He might not know the phrase for it, but he was quite aware of the phenomenon. In his line of work, more than once he had encountered a victim of a horrific crime who had no memory of it at all, and often did not recall anything until years later. In cases of sexual abuse and torture of children in particular, it was often not until over twenty years later that…. Lestrade did the math. Oh fuck.  
  
“There’s a lot of controversy over whether or not it even exists, or if the memories are planted by therapists, but I’ve known a few people personally—before Sherlock, I mean—who were not in therapy but began to recover memories.”  
  
“It’s usually triggered by something, isn’t it?” Greg ran his hand over his eyes.  
  
“Yeah. For Sherlock, it’s pretty easy to identify the triggers, now that we know what happened to him when he was a…” John paused and chuckled. Greg stared at him in surprise. “No. Sorry. I was just going to say ‘when he was a _kid,_ ’ but I just can’t use that word for him.”  
  
Greg smiled back a bit grimly. “Yeah, I know what you mean, mate,” he agreed. “Are there any pictures of him?” he blurted out suddenly.  
  
“Of Sherlock as a child? Uh… yeah. Actually. Just a couple. When he was in hospital after… well… I asked his mum and dad to send me some. Just to have.” John got up from the kitchen chair and sat at the desk, where his laptop was. ( _Like in the old days,_ Greg mused to himself.) Greg turned off the burner under the eggs and moved behind the doctor.  
  
John laughed quietly. “Go ahead, just lean over. No such thing as personal space here,” he commented, smiling a genuine, warm—if tired—smile. He leaned back from his display.  
  
The first image was a black and white one of two remarkably handsome people, both cuddling a newborn. Oh, wow. Yes, obviously his mum and dad. And Sherlock? It was his eyes. Even at that age, when most babies looked (in Greg’s opinion at least) like Winston Churchill, his unique almond-shaped eyes stood out. He wondered where it had been taken, considering the family dynamics, and who took it.  
  
Oh, there was an even sweeter one taken at the same time, with Paul kissing Violet (John had told Greg their Christian names and he found it soothing somehow not to think of them as “Mr and Mrs Holmes” all the time) and Sherlock yawning. _Dull,_ Greg could hear him say, in an infant voice. _Sentiment._ He shook his head. Silly.  
  
And then the next shot. Oh. Oh my God. Who would have thought? For all of his nearly ebony locks and ivory skin now, who would have thought that Sherlock, age three or so, was once a towhead with glowing, healthy color across his pert little nose? And for all his dramatic, sarcastic expressions now—the sunniest of sunny, brilliant smiles? He was cuddled in his mum’s arms, wearing an adorable white turtleneck and trousers with braces, looking up at something, his head thrown back, laughing. She was laughing, too—both of them not appearing to be aware of the camera.  
  
“His dad took that one, she said,” John informed him quietly.  
  
There were a few others shots; not very many. And it was obvious that none of them had been taken any near Stafford Holmes or what Sherlock had considered “home.” In none of them was Sherlock older than seven, he estimated. The grey-haired man suddenly realized that he was bending over his friend, his hand on his shoulder, his nose pressed essentially to his ear. He straightened up guiltily.  
  
“It’s okay, Greg,” John laughed. “I could stare at them for hours. God, I wish there were more. He was so… innocent.” And his voice broke at this, and he looked down fiercely at his keyboard.  
  
Greg patted the shoulder under his hand, clearing his throat. “It’s okay. Believe me. I get it. Now, come on and get some food in you. Mary will be here soon.”  
  
*  
  
“I’ve been doing some research,” Mary offered.  
  
Mary had run up the steps, a rucksack of John’s clothing in one hand, just as they were doing the washing up. Greg had relieved her of the bag, bringing it up to John’s bedroom to give the husband and wife a few minutes alone together.  
  
When he had come back down, Mary was helping herself to coffee while John hung up her coat. “On?” he had asked his wife over his shoulder.  
  
“Apparently the symptoms and behaviors of some traumatised children can be diagnosed as ADHD.”  
  
“What?”  
  
“I found this article…” she moved toward John’s laptop on the desk, her fingers flying over the keyboard as she opened his browser and searched for it. “Here,” she commented, turning the monitor toward them. John leaned over her, his dark eyes scanning it rapidly.  
  
“What’s it say?” Greg asked.  
  
“Erm… it’s early days yet, research-wise, but it makes sense. ‘Hyper-vigilance and dissociation, for example, could be mistaken for inattention. Impulsivity might be brought on by a stress response in overdrive,’” he read aloud.  
  
“You said his mum said he was hyperactive,” Mary added.  
  
“She did. He was. It explains some of why they didn’t realize what was going on.”  
  
“To a certain extent,” Greg interjected bitterly.  
  
“We’ve talked about this,” John warned tiredly. “I wanted to blame his parents, too, but we _all_ —” he emphasized the word all—”know how good Sherlock is at hiding how he feels. His injuries. Illnesses.”  
  
“About the only thing he didn’t hide was the damn cigarettes,” Greg snorted. “I missed a lot of the… harder stuff,” he admitted more quietly.  
  
John turned away, gazing at the skull. “So if he was already hiding things, and we know that Stafford threatened him if he told, and his reaction to the abuse was misinterpreted…”  
  
“He never had a chance,” Mary finished grimly. She cleared her throat and looked down, her eyes glittering.  
  
“Not then, no,” John said slowly, rubbing her shoulders. “But that’s the past. We’ve got to concentrate on what’s going on now and then move forward.”  
  
“How?” Greg demanded.  
  
John looked pointedly at the file—the real file. In a motion eerily similar to Sherlock’s the evening before, he flipped it open with one finger.  
  
Half an hour later, all three of them had briefly reviewed everything in the file, passing reports and photos one to the other—John to Mary to Greg. When Greg put the last document back in the folder, all three of them sighed deeply.  
  
And now Sherlock was stirring. They could tell because his coughing was starting again. Mary winced and, with a sympathetic look at her husband, dug the much-stronger cough medicine out of the pocket of her coat. She handed it to John, who nodded grimly and marched into Sherlock’s bedroom with it.  
  
“Thanks for that,” Greg said to her. She nodded, her lips pressed together grimly.  
  
“Why didn’t… I mean… no. Never mind. I can’t second guess anyone. I haven’t been here.”  
  
“It’s gotten worse,” Greg offered. “The cough, I mean—got worse overnight. It’s not like John wasn’t telling you things.”  
  
“So I surmise. Oh, good morning, Sherlock!”  
  
Greg glanced over his shoulder in surprise. With John’s steadying hand on his back, Sherlock stumbled into the sitting room. He attempted to pull his dressing gown back up on his shoulder, his hand shaking horribly. He was grey, his eyes red.  
  
“Good mor—” he stopped to cough. “mor… morning, Mary,” he managed finally.  
  
John steered him to the sofa and got him seated. “The new medicine will help with that,” he reassured everyone. Sherlock nodded in agreement, obviously not wishing to try speaking again.  
  
“How about some coffee?” Greg offered. He got a nod and went off to the kitchen to fetch it.  
  
When everyone was resettled—John in his chair, Greg in Sherlock’s, and Mary at the desk—Sherlock looked at them over the rim of his cup. “What?” he finally rasped, and John smiled sadly at the tone.  
  
“We have to have a talk, don’t we?” he prompted gently.  
  
Sherlock rolled his eyes, then wiped them with the heel of his hand.  
  
“We said we were going to do this this morning, didn’t we?” the doctor pushed.  
  
“So… talk.”  
  
“We’re _all_ going to talk, you included,” Greg clarified.  
  
“About what?”  
  
John spoke calmly, clearly, and firmly. “We are going to talk about you, and your mum and dad, and your brother, and your… father, and Magnussen, and triggers, and we are going to start with the file that’s in front of you.”  
  
*  
  
“Talk” was perhaps not the more accurate word John could have chosen.  
  
“Shout” was definitely more accurate.  
  
And that was when John began to miss the coughing.  
  
“John, this is beyond ridiculous!” the consulting detective snarled. “There is nothing wrong with me.”  
  
“You can’t deny that that file is real,” Greg pointed out.  
  
“I…” Sherlock spluttered.  
  
“You said it yourself,” Mary interjected.  
  
Sherlock glared at her, the effect multiplied by his razor-sharp cheekbones and the dark circles under his eyes, but diminished by the fact that his entire body was currently shaking and that he had just attempted to stand and had nearly collapsed.  
  
He thought for a moment, struggling through the effects of his illness, the codeine-laced cough medicine, and the fact that he had been unable to keep any significant amount of food in him long enough for any actual digestion to occur in over twelve hours.  
  
“I…” he attempted again.  
  
“Need something to eat,” Greg offered. “I’m going to make you some eggs. And toast.” Sherlock shook his head, his hand over his mouth. “Yeah, I am. And you’re going to eat them. You can handle something simple like that, Sherlock.” The older man nodded decisively and headed for the kitchen.  
  
“Coward,” John muttered at his back. Mary’s mouth twitched as she bit down on a smile.  
  
Sherlock steepled his trembling fingers under his chin, aiming them carefully, attempting to not stab himself in the throat. They let him consider for a bit. John, slumped in his chair, found his eyes closing.  
  
“So if that file is real…” Mary said gently.  
  
“Where’s the baby?” Sherlock interrupted.  
  
“With the neighbor, Mrs Whitney.”  
  
“The mother of the drug user? Is that safe?”  
  
“Sherlock, I love you, but that’s the pot really calling the kettle black,” Mary pointed out fearlessly.  
  
John’s eyes opened again. He looked from his wife to his best friend in concern.  
  
Sherlock shrugged in acquiescence. He had never actually denied the drug _use_ , John reflected silently. It was the _addiction_ he had an objection to.  
  
And that it was ruining his life.  
  
Yeah, that.  
  
“I want to see her,” his friend mumbled, dropping his head into his hands.  
  
“Oh, I know you do, my love!” Mary blurted out, sincerely. “And I _promise_ I will bring her ‘round as soon as you’re feeling better. But right now…you know…the cough…”  
  
“Oh, right!” Sherlock agreed, nodding. “I might be contagious. Right. But…?”  
  
“But what, love?”  
  
“When I’m feeling better? I _miss_ her.” Admitting this seemed to surprise him.  
  
“When you’re feeling better… yes. Of _course._ ” Mary ducked her head and, sniffing, got up and headed to the kitchen. “Going to help with eggs,” she mumbled hoarsely.  
  
“Coward,” John muttered bitterly.  
  
“Why don’t you go help, too?” Sherlock spat out.  
  
“What?” John ran his hand through his short hair in exasperation.  
  
“Surely it takes a detective inspector, a nurse, _and_ a doctor to make eggs and toast,” Sherlock replied sarcastically.  
  
“Stop. I’m right here,” John replied.  
  
“I want to see the baby.”  
  
“I know you do. I do, too. But even if the bronchitis isn’t terribly infectious, it’s still not exactly safe right now for her to be here, is it, Sherlock?” John folded his arms across his chest.  
  
Sherlock’s head drooped. His chin hit his chest.  
  
“Is it?” the doctor prodded.  
  
“Nuh… no,” came the reluctant reply.  
  
“But it will be,” John added hastily. “When you’re a bit better. I promise. So does Mary. How about another holiday, hmm?”  
  
Sherlock considered this. Their trip had not been, despite everything, a horrible time, and he had really loved how much care taking (and all right—cuddling) time he had gotten with the baby.  
  
“Can I choose where we go?” he ventured.  
  
John laughed. “Sure,” he agreed. “A tour of famous murder sites?” he guessed.  
  
Sherlock frowned. “You’ve spoiled the surprise,” he grumbled.  
  
“You lunatic,” John replied affectionately. “Sure. Why not?”  
  
Greg and Mary rejoined them. Mary brought a plate over to Sherlock, curling up on the sofa next to him, holding it in one hand, a fork in the other.  
  
“All right, love,” she said patiently. “Try these. Greg’s cooking isn’t really that bad.” She deliberately took a bite of the eggs, then filled the fork again and held it up to Sherlock’s mouth.  
  
“I can feed myself,” he mumbled, taking the fork. The quivering golden pile promptly fell off. He looked mortified. John and Greg looked away.  
  
“It’s all right, love,” Mary murmured. “Shhh. I’ve got it.” And Mary patiently fed Sherlock his eggs because his hands were shaking so much he couldn’t keep them on his fork.  
  
“And now, some toast? What’s this?” Mary asked Greg, taking a bite.  
  
“Ginger marmalade,” he supplied. And yes, he had cut the toast into soldiers because he knew that Sherlock liked it that way.  
  
“Yum! I’ve got to get some,” she replied genially, as if they were having a perfectly normal conversation about jams that had nothing whatsoever with the fact that Mary was casually taste-testing Sherlock’s food so he would know that he wasn’t being poisoned.  
  
“I like raspberry,” Sherlock grumbled, taking a bite from the soldier she offered.  
  
“You like anything sweet,” John commented. “Ginger is good for your stomach,” he added.  
  
“Thank you, _doctor_ ,” Sherlock said around a mouthful of toast. Dreadful manners he had while eating, John thought. Always did have. Interesting. Had Stafford tolerated them, ignored them, or was it in defiance of the man’s insistence on perfect manners?  
  
God. When did everything Sherlock said and did turn into something to do with his abuse?  
  
And it was defiance. John knew Sherlock too well. But he was also thrilled that Sherlock ate everything on his plate and finished his coffee. Mary took the plate to the kitchen, smiling victoriously at her husband.  
  
Greg, in contrast, frowned. He knew what was coming.  
  
“All right for now?” John asked the thin man.  
  
“I suppose.”  
  
“So let’s get back to the file,” John stated. Sherlock made a face. “Nope. No. Enough evasion. Tell me about the file.”  
  
Sherlock closed his eyes, sinking back into the sofa. He took a deep breath—tentatively, as if expecting to start coughing. And then he began to speak.  
  
“This is an authentic case file, which is a vast improvement on the badly-counterfeited one you tried to pass off. One tip? Mistakes. The real file is full of them. Apparently becoming a policeman makes it impossible to spell or type.”  
  
“All right,” Greg responded tightly.  
  
“So if it’s authentic…” Mary prompted, returning with a sealed bottle of Tizer, which she deposited on the coffee table before curling up on the sofa next to Sherlock again.  
  
“If it’s authentic… it means…”  
  
They waited.  
  
They waited quite a while. John wondered if the cough mixture had been too strong. Was Sherlock asleep?  
  
“It means that I… that my father… that Stafford Holmes…” Sherlock opened his eyes. He looked at Greg, at Mary. At John. He took a deep, shaky breath. “It means that the man that I called ‘Father’ killed himself and framed me for it.”  
  
Oh, God. He had said it. “Good job,” John murmured.  
  
“So, I’ve admitted it. Can I go now?” Sherlock made a nothing-but-pathetic attempt to rise that Mary quelled with two fingers. He sat back down, then leaned forward, resting his elbows on his knees and his head in his hands.  
  
“Admitting it is one thing. Do you _remember_ it?” Greg’s voice sounded harsh in his own ears.  
  
“No,” Sherlock mumbled into his hands.  
  
“Do not remember it the way you ‘don’t remember’ me asking you to replace the plastic containers you melted with toes in them—” Greg gave John a look—“or did you _delete_ it?”  
  
“I did replace them,” Sherlock circumvented hopefully.  
  
“You borrowed some from Mrs Hudson. That’s not the same. And answer my question.”  
  
“I suppose I deleted it.”  
  
“Do you remember the very first thing you deleted?” John asked suddenly.  
  
“Do I remember… what I’ve forgotten?” Sherlock replied slowly, over enunciating. “John, that’s more idiotic than…” And then Sherlock’s expression changed from aggravated to—surprised.  
  
“What?” Mary nudged gently. “What do you remember?”  
  
“The solar system,” he replied dreamily.  
  
“You deleted the solar system,” John reminded him.  
  
“Yes. Apparently. And I seem to recall… getting in quite a bit of trouble for it.”  
  
“At school?” Greg supplied, a thoughtful look on his face. John looked at the silver-haired man quizzically, but he held up a hand. “Sherlock,” he said slowly. “Have you ever made a model of the solar system?”  
  
“Why would I do _that_?” Sherlock attempted to sound bored.  
  
“Pretty common school project. My own kids—both of them—different-sized balls and wires and all that. It was tricky. I had to help them.”  
  
John raised his eyebrows in understanding.  
  
“Did you, Sherlock?” Mary pressed.  
  
“I suppose I did, then,” he shrugged.  
  
“And what happened to it?” John asked tightly.  
  
“I…” Sherlock’s voice faded off. He pressed his hands tightly into his eyes. “I think… I made one. I remember being annoyed because I couldn’t make it to scale—it simply wasn’t possible.” Greg nodded; apparently this was familiar territory for parents of children of a certain age. “But I did make one, by myself.”  
  
“And what happened to it?” Mary encouraged.  
  
“I… don’t remember. It was ages ago.”  
  
“I think you do remember,” she replied.  
  
“Someone maybe destroyed it?” Sherlock sounded uncharacteristically uncertain.  
  
“Maybe was that _someone_ Stafford Holmes?” John barely breathed.  
  
“I… why are we talking about this?”  
  
“Sherlock, is there a possibility that you put a lot of effort into making a model of the solar system by yourself, and your father destroyed it, and as a reaction, you deleted anything you knew about it—about the entire solar system?”  
  
“I don’t know.”  
  
“Then why did you bring it up?”  
  
“You asked me for the first thing I deleted. Apparently that was it.”  
  
“And I’m just linking A to B to C,” John replied calmly, but firmly.  
  
“So what?”  
  
“You’re the detective,” Lestrade interjected. “You tell us.”  
  
He shot him a look, and for a few seconds, Sherlock’s rapid-fire “deduction” voice, albeit rough, was back. He began to spit out words as fast as he could. “So what if I did make a model of the solar system and my father threw it in the fire and the teacher accused me of not doing the work and making it up as an excuse and I tried to show her the burns when he took the wires out of the fire and laid them across my arms and who _cares_ if we go ‘round the sun…” Sherlock stopped speaking abruptly. His head dropped into his hands again. Mary gently laid a hand on his shoulder. He tried shoving her away, suddenly surprising them all by succeeding. He lurched up off the sofa and attempted to maneuver around the coffee table.  
  
“Where are you going?” John asked quietly. Sherlock waved his hand toward the kitchen. “You need the loo?” the doctor suggested, already up out of his chair. Sherlock nodded. “All right. Come on.” John put a hand on the thin man’s back and guided him down the hall.  
  
Greg looked at Mary, who was staring at the spot on the sofa where the younger man had been sitting, the tears that had been lurking in her eyes finally spilling over. He finally got up and sat next to her, wrapping a reassuring arm around her shoulders.  
  
After a few moments, the bathroom door opened. The two men took the few steps into Sherlock’s bedroom, and then that door shut.  
  
“Do you think that’s it for a bit?” Mary asked.  
  
“Yeah, probably. Wouldn’t surprise me if he falls asleep again,” Greg offered.  
  
“I’m going to check on the baby,” Mary responded, pulling her mobile out of her pocket and heading up the stairs to John’s old bedroom. Greg nodded in acknowledgment to the empty room.


	18. Waves Crashing on the Beach

Greg was correct. John had gotten Sherlock cleaned up and back into bed, rubbing the man’s back through the duvet until he drifted off, clearly exhausted. When he was sure the sleep was sound, he crept out, leaving the door open behind him. He found Greg in the kitchen considering a few tins of soup for lunch.  
  
“Mary’s upstairs,” he supplied. “Oxtail or Mulligatawny?”  
  
“Oxtail,” Mary replied for him, stepping back into the room.  
  
“I’ve got some potatoes, too,” the D.I. responded, reaching into the fridge. “How is he?” he asked the doctor.  
  
“Asleep. This is driving me mad. He’s not going to get any better if he can’t keep anything down.”  
  
“He needs calories. He likes sweets. Maybe some cake?” Greg mused.  
  
“Banoffee pie,” Mary murmured. “Be right back!” She dashed down the stairs and they could hear her knocking on the door of Flat A.  
  
“Oh, Mary!” Mrs Hudson’s voice drifted up. “Come in!”  
  
Mary was back up in ten minutes. Greg had gotten the soup warming in a pan and the potatoes in the microwave.  
  
“Mrs Hudson’s going to do some shopping,” she offered.  
  
“She is an amazing woman. I don’t know how she does it,” John admitted.  
  
“She loves him. Same as you and me,” Mary replied. “I’d like tea with that, please.”  
  
*  
  
She and Greg were doing the washing up when Mrs Hudson came up, tapping hesitantly on the frame of the door. She held two bags out and Greg took them, thanking her profusely. John was checking on Sherlock, which he had done every ten minutes, unable to even get through his lunch. Mary patted his hand as he rose, but he shook her off.  
  
“He can’t help himself,” she offered to Greg.  
  
“If it wasn’t him, it’d be me,” he admitted.  
  
This time, though, John returned with a weary Sherlock. He didn’t look at anyone as John settled him on the sofa, staring blearily out at the afternoon sun shining through the window. John returned to the kitchen.  
  
“How about a cuppa for him?” he said wearily to no one in particular.  
  
“Sure,” Greg responded briskly, snapping on the kettle. Mary found a plate and utensils and deftly sliced a piece of the decadent pie that Mrs Hudson had gotten for them. John brought the steaming hot tea and pudding over to Sherlock, sighing as he went through the food-tasting ritual, then offering his companion a forkful of the overly-sweet, sticky dessert.  
  
John sighed again, this time in relief, when both pie and tea were consumed. He returned to the kitchen, placing the dishes in the sink. Mary and Greg were sitting at the table, playing cards. John quirked a smile—rather than playing poker or even Snap against Mary, which would be losing propositions, Greg had apparently chosen Old Maid.  
  
“How did you know he’d eat that?” he asked Mary.  
  
“I phoned his mum. Got a list of his favourites.” She dug into her jeans pocket and pulled out a list, hand-written on sheet from a pocket notebook. John took it from her and glanced at it. Mrs Hudson had done well; nearly everything on the list was now in the kitchen. It was a dentist’s and nutritionist’s nightmare. Tizer he knew about. Cadbury Flake was familiar. Cadbury Fruit and Nut—that was almost nutritious in comparison. Apples had a question mark next to them. Several types of biscuits, also not a surprise. Eggy bread. A particular brand of crisps. Any kind of pasta as long as it was not in a red sauce. Fine.  
  
There were also some items in a separate list at the bottom of the sheet, headed by the word NO in capital letters. So, no Brussel sprouts. Hardly a surprise. No rotisserie chicken. Huh. No mushrooms on pizza. Several other items, all very specific—not general ingredients but specific preparations or combinations of them. Peas were all right. Pearl onions were all right. Mixing the two? NO. John wondered if he had ever prepared any of the verboten items. He didn’t like Brussel sprouts himself, so that was a no. But the peas and pearl onions he certainly had offered, and more than likely, Sherlock had refused.  
  
By now John knew that most of the detective’s odder quirks were related, fairly directly, to the abuse he had endured and then buried in his subconscious. Did he want to know why peas were all right, and pearl onions were, but mixing the two was practically poison to the man? He might find out at some point, he realized, whether he wanted to or not, but he didn’t have the heart to seek the information out himself.  
  
Could the man possibly get any more complicated?  
  
*  
  
John wanted to kick himself a short time later for asking that question. The energy Sherlock gained from the sugary delight had gone to his head, and he had spent a fruitless fifteen minutes pushing the limits of the stronger cough mixture by shouting at them to leave. They were grateful that he was still terribly weak; the pillows and other scattered items that he attempted throwing at them didn’t get even halfway to their targets. They were at an impasse. Sherlock was admitting that his father had abused him, but it was clear that he didn’t actually remember it—not consciously—and had no inclination whatsoever to do so now.  
  
“Why do you keep insisting that I bring this all up to the surface?” he demanded.  
  
“It will make you feel better,” John replied evenly, amazed that he hadn’t shouted or thrown anything back (yet).  
  
“All it does is… make me bring things up,” Sherlock spat bitterly.  
  
“It’s unfortunate that you’re having such a physical reaction to this,” John agreed. “I’m not really enjoying it, either.”  
  
“Then leave me alone!”  
  
“It’s not that simple,” Greg interjected, stooping to pick up one of the thrown books. He glanced at the title and frowned. What the hell was _Le Petit Prince_? He flipped through the first few pages. It looked like a children’s book. In French.  
  
“Why not?” he demanded. And coughed. Damn. John glanced at his watch.  
  
“Because I can’t have you flipping out at a crime scene because it reminds you of something that bastard did to you, and we can’t predict when that will happen because you can’t remember enough to tell us!” Greg threw the book at the fireplace. It landed on the floor open, its pages mashed against the carpet. Mary shook her head and went to pick it up. “Leave it!” Greg thundered. Mary froze and put her hands up in surrender. “Sorry,” Greg muttered.  
  
“It’s all right,” she murmured back.  
  
Sherlock was watching this distractedly. “You…” he finally started. Coughed.  
  
“Me?” Greg replied, taking a deep breath and trying to calm down.  
  
“You… still want me at crime scenes?”  
  
“Do I still… of _course_ I do, you idiot! That’s what this is all about! I want you at crime scenes and shouting at Anderson and pissing off Donovan and taking things from my office and making all of us look like morons… all of that!”  
  
Sherlock looked down at his feet. Greg looked at him, then sighed and sat down on the coffee table in front of him. “Sherlock,” he said quietly. No reply. “Sherlock. I don’t mean just the crime scene stuff. I mean, you’re amazing, and I admit that I rely on you maybe more than I should, but that’s not the only reason I want you to be all right.”  
  
“John, could you come downstairs with me? I want to pay Mrs Hudson for the groceries,” Mary said quietly.  
  
“What? Oh… oh, yeah. All right.”  
  
Greg watched them leave, shutting the door behind them. He finally turned back and laid his hands on Sherlock’s knees.  
  
“Hey. Look at me,” he said quietly, his voice almost a whisper.  
  
Sherlock’s eyes never left his own feet.  
  
“Sherlock, you know it’s more than just The Work, right? I mean, I don’t value you just because of that.”  
  
Silence.  
  
“Look. It’s… going out to dinner, and being invited here for Christmas, and sneaking cigarettes with you, and listening to you deduce everyone in A  & E at three o’clock in the morning.”  
  
Sherlock glanced up toward him through his unruly curls.  
  
“Do you remember the first time we met?” he asked the bleary-eyed man. Sherlock paused, then shook his head. “I’m not surprised. You were high as a fucking kite, you showed up at a crime scene, and you solved the whole fucking mess in less than fifteen minutes. And then you puked in my car.”  
  
Sherlock dropped his head into his hands and groaned.  
  
“No, no! It’s okay. I mean… it wasn’t. But… it wasn’t that bad. It was… well. I don’t know what it was, except that I liked what I saw. You were such a bloody genius, and so passionate. A bit intense, yeah. But in a good way.”  
  
“What is the point of this?” Sherlock growled.  
  
“The point is that I’ve been privileged to see you at your very best, and that’s what makes me hate it when you’re… when you fuck up.” Sherlock scowled. “Yeah, I know you don’t use language like that, public school twat. But I do. And so does John. And that’s because you drive us mad sometimes.” He ran his hand through his silver hair.  
  
“So why… if I drive you both mad, why are you still here?”  
  
Greg’s eyes opened wide. Something the great detective couldn’t figure out? Well, it did have to do with feelings. Not really his area. He sighed and took a deep breath. And let loose. “Because we _like_ you, you git! I have no idea why--and you do drive me absolutely bonkers sometimes—but it’s worth it. I _like_ you. As a friend. Why can’t you get that through that thick skull of yours?”  
  
“I just don’t get it,” Sherlock admitted in such a low voice that Greg had to lean forward even more to hear him.  
  
“Don’t overthink it. Just accept it.”  
  
“I’m tired,” Sherlock replied.  
  
“I know.” Greg put a hand on his forehead, then laid his wrist on the nape of his neck. Sherlock gave him a look. “What? That’s how my mum checked for a fever.” Sherlock glared at him. “Would you rather I kissed your forehead?”  
  
Sherlock snorted. Greg grinned. Derision was always a good thing when it came to Sherlock.  
  
“And… your temp is going up. Bugger. Predictable. Late afternoon. I don’t know what schedule you’re on for meds. How about a bath and we ask John when he comes back up?” Sherlock nodded. Greg stood up and held his hands out. “Come on,” he offered. “And can I state for the record that there’s something really funny about _you_ , of all people, having a fever that’s so ‘normal’?”  
  
Sherlock shot him a look and Greg grinned brilliantly at him as he guided the shaking man toward the bathroom.  
  
*  
  
The bath had gone all right. The return of John and Mary from downstairs had not. Well, the return of Mary, to be specific.  
  
“She’s going to shoot me!” Sherlock had shrieked when she had peeked into the bathroom. He had thrown the bottle of shampoo at her in a panic before Greg could react. She did, though, immediately withdrawing.  
  
“Sherlock! What the fuck?” he had exclaimed.  
  
“She’s… she’s…” Sherlock coughed.  
  
“She’s out. Okay? Time to get out.” He pulled the plug and helped the thin man out, rubbing him vigorously with one of the luxurious towels. He trundled him into his bedroom. “Time for a lie-down, yeah?” He wasn’t really asking. As he had done before, he let Sherlock slip into bed without bothering to get him into any clothes. “I’m going to ask John about your meds. I’m pretty sure it’s time for a dose. All right?”  
  
Sherlock didn’t reply. He was obviously very achy and curled gratefully into his soft sheets. Greg turned off the bedside lamp and swung the door partially shut behind him.  
  
“God, Mary, I’m so sorry…” Greg sputtered as he entered the sitting room.  
  
“It’s fine, Greg,” she assured him.  
  
“His temp’s up,” he responded, partially to alert John and partially to explain why Mary had suddenly become a target of his ire.  
  
“I’ll go.” John went through the kitchen to gather the bottles of medication and a plastic cup of water. He shut the door to the bedroom behind himself as he entered.  
  
Greg fell heavily into John’s chair. “He must have thought you were someone else. I’m not sure I want to know who.”  
  
Mary nodded quietly. They sat for a few moments, saying nothing.  
  
“It makes sense—the cocaine. Why it calms him down,” Mary supplied suddenly, wanting to fill the silence of the room. Lestrade swiveled his head toward her, disbelief fighting for exhaustion on his face.  
  
“Sense?” he muttered. “What the _fuck_ are you on about?” He flinched, realizing that that had been A Bit Not Good.  
  
Mary waved it off with her hand. She understood. “Look. You understand how Ritalin works for hyperactivity?”  
  
“Not really. I know it’s a stimulant, but it never made much sense to me to give stimulants to someone who’s already bouncing off the walls.”  
  
Mary nodded. “Yeah, it doesn’t make sense until you look at the brain chemistry. To keep it short, there’s parts of the brain that help control behaviour, including focus and attention. In some people, apparently, their brains don’t have enough dopamine and noradrenaline to have those parts work properly. The exact chemistry isn’t really understood entirely, but giving stimulants apparently stimulates those parts of the brain, making them work better and allowing more self-control. It doesn’t work for everyone, but for a lot of people, it really helps.”  
  
“And Sherlock found this out by accident, just screwing around with drugs?”  
  
“I doubt it. Master chemist, remember? I think he made the connection himself early on—I mean, by accident. He started on caffeine and nicotine. That just wasn’t enough—but he probably figured it was easier to find a stimulant on his own rather than go to a doctor.”  
  
Lestrade nodded in agreement. That sounded more like Sherlock. “It explains the nicotine patches when he’s on a case,” he added.  
  
“Definitely,” Mary replied.  
  
“You’ve told John this?”  
  
“Yeah. We were just talking about it downstairs with Mrs Hudson.”  
  
“You’ve been doing a lot of research.”  
  
“I’ve been going mad, Greg! I knew what was going on here for a while—I mean, John’s been staying here more and more often, and he tells me what’s been happening—what Sherlock says and does. I’ve felt so helpless, though—just staying home with the baby. I had to do _something_ to help.”  
  
“It _is_ a help. I mean, frankly, all we’ve been doing here is putting out fires. There’s no plan any more.” He dropped his head on the back of the chair and closed his eyes with a groan. “I am so out of my depth…” he mumbled.  
  
“You’re doing fine. You’re the only one he hasn’t attempted to kill so far.”  
  
“And Mrs Hudson.”  
  
“Well… no. Apparently he got a bit muddled last week and claimed she was the head of some drug cartel.”  
  
“I… oh. Yeah. I guess he was muddled.”  
  
“She didn’t seem to be too upset about it. It’s fine. She knows he’s ill.”  
  
Greg bit on the inside of his cheek to prevent the smile that was threatening to break through. “Yeah. She’s a good sport,” he managed instead.  
  
Mary gave up and snorted. Greg opened his eyes wide in amazement. They looked at each other, realization dawning in his head. And they both burst into laughter.  
  
John re-entered, a tentative smile on his face in reaction to their mirth. “What’s all this, then?” he prodded, wanting something to laugh at. Needing something.  
  
“Not-Your-Housekeeper,” Greg managed.  
  
“I’m making jammie dodgers,” Mary replied, her hand over her mouth. “And you don’t get any until you put away those AK-47s!”  
  
“What have I told you about getting blood on the carpet?” Greg blurted out.  
  
“I need an herbal soother…” John joined in.  
  
And then they truly lost it. Exhausted, devastated, sick at heart, there was nothing else they could do but laugh.  
  
And it felt so good.  
  
“Oh, my,” Mary was finally able to say, wiping tears from her eyes.  
  
“We really shouldn’t,” John attempted, barely getting his breath back.  
  
“I mean, there’s no proof,” Greg offered, taking a deep breath.  
  
“Well, there’s not _now_ ,” John responded drily, and they were off again.  
  
“Fancy a holiday in Florida?” Greg finally wheezed.  
  
“Sounds _lovely_ ,” Mary responded as seriously as she could.  
  
John had given up and was leaning up against the door frame holding his stomach. Madness. His life was madness.  
  
And there was a moan from Sherlock’s bedroom and John nearly twisted his ankle spinning and running down the hallway.  
  
Mary’s face fell and she sighed.  
  
*  
  
“I’m going to head home to our baby,” Mary murmured to John. He nodded a bit absently, staring at Sherlock’s back as he rubbed it through the duvet. She had given him ten minutes, then walked down the hallway so silently John had startled when she pushed the bedroom door open.  
  
“He’s asleep again.”  
  
“Phone me later?”  
  
John didn’t reply.  
  
He emerged from the bedroom ten minutes after that, looking puzzled. “Where’s Mary?” he asked Greg, who had snapped on the telly and was watching the news.  
  
“She went home. Didn’t she say?”  
  
“Oh. Oh! Right! Yeah, she did. Sorry. God, this is awful. I feel like half my brain’s been flushed down the toilet with most of Sherlock’s meals.”  
  
“He kept down the pie,” Greg pointed out.  
  
“True. But it made him manic. I’d like to get some protein into him. How about a Chinese and we can get him some soup?”  
  
“Yeah, that’s fine. I’ll order.”


	19. Evening the Odds

“What the…? Mycroft?”  
  
The ever-proper minor figure in the British government (liar) stood at the door. His ever-present umbrella dangled from his forearm. In one hand he held a familiar bag of take-away, and in the other a black shopping bag of unknown origin. John, who had heard the bell ring and knew that Mrs Hudson would open it, shoved his wallet back in his pocket and took both bags.  
  
Mycroft Holmes brushed his hands delicately across each other distastefully—whether over the content of the bags or the concept of manual labour John wasn’t sure—and leaned his umbrella against the wall.  
  
“Come in?” John offered belatedly over his shoulder, taking the bags into the kitchen. Greg nodded coolly from where he was stretched out on the sofa, the remote in one hand, clearly not impressed with the man in the three-piece suit. The man who had been conspicuously absent while his brother had melted down. Oh, sure, there had been the little issue of Mycroft being the spit and image of his brother’s tormenter, but that, at least in Greg’s mind, didn’t excuse him.  
  
“Good evening, Detective Inspector,” the man offered oily.  
  
“It’s Greg here,” he grunted back, reluctantly thumbing off the telly. Not that he was watching anything with any great interest, but he just wasn’t in the mood to pander to the man who walked around as if his ever-present umbrella was actually stuffed up his…  
  
“Tea, Mycroft?” John interceded smoothly.  
  
“Actually, if you look in that black bag, I brought something that might be a bit more welcome, John,” Mycroft replied. Always in control, that bastard, Greg thought, reluctantly sitting up on the sofa. He heard the bag rustling.  
  
“Hey, thank you!” John called.  
  
More rustling. A drawer opening and shutting. Glasses clinking. And in short order John appeared with three glasses of Scotch. He offered Greg one of them, and he took it gratefully.  
  
Good God, yes. Beer would have been fine at that point. Or wine. Mouth wash. The take-away could wait. He took a taste. It was fantastic—smooth and full and slightly sweet—like satin in his mouth.  
  
All right. Mycroft Holmes was a stuck-up twat, but if he was paying for a bottle of Dalwhinnie, that was fine.  
  
“Sherlock’s asleep,” John was saying to their visitor as Mycroft gingerly seated himself in John’s chair and John perched in Sherlock’s.  
  
“Yes, I know. That’s why I came now. I don’t actually want to see him. No, that’s not accurate. Of course I want to see him,” he continued before either of the other men could protest. “I don’t think that _him_ seeing _me_ is the best idea at present, hmm?”  
  
They both nodded their acquiescence. Considering Sherlock’s admittedly fuzzy grasp on who was with him at times, especially when his fever went up, the elder Holmes was probably right. Damn him.  
  
“Then why are you here?” Greg blurted out.  
  
“And how did you know he was asleep?” John added. Greg realized with a start that the doctor was as angry at their uninvited guest as he was; he was just bloody excellent at hiding it. Damn that John Watson.  
  
Mycroft waved one manicured hand languidly. “Oh, please, Dr Watson. You know how.”  
  
“I thought you had the cameras removed from the flat.” Greg frowned at John’s statement. Cameras?  
  
“I only had them temporarily removed because there was an incident with a... ‘hacker’ (the distaste at having to use the word was visible) that nearly compromised one of my brother’s assignments for me. It was too dangerous to continue the feed. I had them reinstituted recently.”  
  
“God, Mycroft! Why didn’t you let me know?” John ground out between clenched teeth.  
  
“I’m not in the habit of telling my brother’s old flatmates about security measures regarding issues of national—”  
  
“Shut up, Mycroft!” John and Mycroft both looked sharply at Greg, who was killing his glass of Scotch at a rate not recommended by any sommelier. “Sorry,” he muttered immediately.  
  
“You’re exhausted, both of you,” Mycroft offered.  
  
“Well, yeah, of course we are. What did you expect?” Greg spat back, regretting his apology far more than his outburst.  
  
“I am truly sorry.” John and Greg stared at each other. The change in the other man’s tone was unexpected, to say the least. Gone were the plumy, starched tones of the consummate diplomat. His body language had also altered radically. He slumped down into the soft chair, his face crumbling.  
  
“God, I’m sorry,” Greg muttered, feeling like an idiot. He didn’t have as much contact with Mycroft as John did—When Sherlock was younger and fucking up, Mycroft had still been struggling up the political ladder and had purposely distanced himself to avoid scandal, so Greg had had little opportunity to get to know him when he was getting to know Sherlock—but he could see that despite the prim and proper façade, Mycroft really did love his brother, and the downward spiral his life had taken really did dig into him.  
  
Of course, most reports from John weren’t exactly of the warm and fuzzy type. But he did also realize that Mycroft, for all his power (and that scared him not just a little), could actually do nothing to help his baby brother right at that moment.  
  
Hence the Scotch. Greg drained his drink and stood up in search of more. He charged his glass (John had shaken his head in refusal of more at the moment and he didn’t exactly offer Mycroft) and plunked himself back down. The cushions on the sofa smelled like Sherlock—expensive shampoo and worn wool; hydrochloric acid and cough mixture; mint and smoke. He shut his eyes and breathed it in. Not bothering to open them, he took a good, healthy swig.  
  
“Interesting thing to bring to an addict’s home, hmmm?” he muttered, lofting his glass in the general direction of Mycroft.  
  
“Alcohol isn’t one of Sherlock’s substance problems, and it also doesn’t trigger any sort of adverse reaction in him if others drink around him. Stafford was not a heavy drinker, and Sherlock, with his sensitive stomach, learned rather quickly as a teenager to avoid overindulging,” Mycroft offered only somewhat stiffly.  
  
Well, almost learned, Greg thought with a small smile, recalling John’s wonderfully pathetic and wonderfully normal stag night. The great brain (and its associated stomach) felled by whiskey and beer. God, that had been just—funny. The only downside was that the lightweights had given up and gone back to the flat before he could join them. His damn job had ruined their plans (it was Sherlock’s idea to surprise John with Greg joining them; Greg was still flabbergasted that Sherlock had thought of any of it, let alone that).  
  
Never mind. There would be other nights.  
  
There would be.  
  
Sherlock would be all right.  
  
More Scotch. That was the ticket. He took another sip. Slow down, he told himself. Enjoy it.  
  
“I’m sorry. I seem to have intercepted… interrupted your dinner,” Mycroft continued.  
  
“No, it’s fine. We were going to reheat when Sherlock woke up anyway,” John offered, doffing his glass and making it perfectly clear that he knew that the elder brother had paid the delivery man for their meal and that he, John, had no intention whatsoever of paying him back.  
  
“Why are you here?” Greg interjected. He opened his eyes and looked directly at the overly-posh man sitting before him. “You never answered before.”  
  
Mycroft considered his answer. Clever bastard. Finally, he sighed and opened his mouth.  
  
“Mummy wanted me to come,” he admitted. “Not that I didn’t, but I hesitated.”  
  
“All right,” Greg agreed. That actually made sense. He and John had not wanted Sherlock’s mum and dad to see him so sick, but they had certainly understood their desire to really know what was going on.  
  
And then it hit him. He—Mycroft Holmes—the man who essentially controlled the British government and so much more besides—was there because his mum had told him so.  
  
He couldn’t help it. He really couldn’t. Greg snickered.  
  
John tipped his head quizzically at the silver-haired man. He was only on his second drink, wasn’t he? “Greg?” he prodded, a hesitant smile on his face.  
  
“He… he… he came because his mummy told him to…” Greg chortled.  
  
John snorted.  
  
And then neither of them could hold back. Not for ages. Not until they were both wiping away tears and holding their bellies and every time they caught a glance of Mycroft’s uncomfortable look they just started in again, helplessly. It was a miracle that Sherlock didn’t wake up.  
  
Finally, they calmed down.  
  
“All out of your systems then?” Mycroft asked.  
  
Nope.  
  
It felt so good to laugh.  
  
The entire circumstance was mad and it was all right to laugh about it. And think. And pray.  
  
*  
  
“Wait. Hold on… I just had a thought. Why didn’t Moriarty trigger any of this?” John asked a bit blurrily. He was on his second glass of Scotch, having caught up to Greg, but with no dinner it was hitting him rather harder than he had planned. Sherlock was still sound asleep (Greg had just checked) and it had suddenly occurred to the doctor that if anyone getting shot in the head in front of the consulting detective was going to trigger his problems, why wasn’t it Moriarty, who had actually, like Stafford, shot himself?  
  
“Some of it was the difference in personalities. Magnussen’s bearing; his way of speaking—everything, even his appearance—was somewhat reminiscent of Stafford’s. And of course his desire for control and secrecy. Moriarty, for all his pulling of strings, thrived on the theatrical—on chaos. Public shootings and explosions. You know how Sherlock felt about them. Moriarty fascinated him—a rather obscene amount, I’m afraid. But Magnussen disgusted and repelled him in a way much deeper than his activities as a blackmailer warranted.” There was a pause as Mycroft took a deep breath and pursed his mouth, considering. Finally, he spoke again, and his voice was much quieter and rough with anguish. “Although I suspect that, in point of fact, Moriarty’s suicide affected him much more than any of us realized,” he finally got out.  
  
“What happened when he was away?” John asked quietly, leaning forward and suddenly sounding more sober. Ordinarily he avoided talking about those two years, but this was obviously important.  
  
“Nothing as bad what’s he’s going through now, as far as I know,” Mycroft said smoothly.  
  
“As far as you know?” John put his glass on the floor and gripped his knees tightly.  
  
“He was constantly on the run, undercover, using aliases… I wasn’t really in contact with him.”  
  
“Ever?” Greg blurted out.  
  
“Three times in two years, to be exact.” As if the man in the three-piece suit had to qualify anything he said about himself with the phrase _to be exact._ Greg wanted to throw something. “But there were reports of episodes …” the posh man’s voice uncharacteristically petered out and he looked down at his trouser leg. Ran a finger along one perfect crease.  
  
“Episodes of what?” John demanded.  
  
Mycroft closed his eyes and his voice was low. “Drug use. Cocaine, mostly. Not one night of uninterrupted sleep the entire time he was gone. Not eating. And…” and the man essentially in charge of the British government paused, and Greg swore later that he heard a sob before the voice dropped down to a whisper, “and he would…”  
  
And Mycroft couldn’t continue, but John was not putting up with that. “Would _what?”_ he demanded.  
  
“You’re already got him shooting up. What could be worse?” Greg added a touch sarcastically.  
  
“He would… injure… himself…”  
  
Oh. That. Yeah. Something so familiar to John and Greg that they hadn’t even realized that to Mycroft, there was something worse than the needle.  
  
“Yeah, he does that,” John offered bitterly, “when you cut off his supply.”  
  
“I remember one night…” Greg muttered. And then he stopped. Maybe this was not the time and place?  
  
“Go on, _Detective Inspector,_ ” Mycroft responded. Ooh that man…  
  
But Greg, glancing at John, who nodded encouragingly, swallowed his ire and continued. “It was shortly after I got to know him. Case went wrong. Kidnapping—a girl.” His tone changed; damned if he was going to hide his emotional reaction to what his job entailed for once.  
  
“You found her too late?” John supplied.  
  
“Yeah. Well, _he_ did. He took it personally—not finding her in time. I found him in the gents back at the Yard… fucking piece of broken glass was still in his hand. He had… he had cut into his stomach.”  
  
“I don’t wish to hear any more,” the posh man seated in front of him sighed. And the silver-haired man suddenly felt his blood boil. He had had enough. He rose and loomed over him, spitting out his words.  
  
“Tough! You need to. You _need_ to hear more. You’re part of this, you prick. A huge part. You knew what was happening when he was a kid and you did nothing. You knew what he was going through when he was away and _you did nothing._ He’s such a mess right now that he can’t use the fucking toilet by himself and you sit here— _DOING NOTHING_!” Greg ended with a snarl.  
  
Mycroft winced and pulled as far away as he could, shrinking back into the chair.  
  
“Easy,” John murmured, wondering if he needed to intervene physically.  
  
“No. No more _easy._ No more having everyone else do your dirty work for you. You get up, and you walk down that hall, and you go into his room, and you _look_ at your brother, and you use those twisted observational skills that you share with him to ‘deduce’ what he’s feeling. And if he needs it, you will bring him to the bathroom, and you will help him use the toilet. If he needs it, you will hold his head while he pukes, and you help him wipe his face and rinse his mouth when he’s done. If he needs it, you will change his clothes and take his temperature and give him his medicine. And then you will bring him out here and taste-test his food for him so he knows that he’s not being poisoned by _your father._ Now. Right. The. Fuck. _NOW_.”  
  
And Mycroft Holmes stood up and without a word walked down the hall to his brother’s bedroom.  
  
“Fuck, Greg,” John mumbled.  
  
“Yeah.”  
  
He did not give a fuck, flying or otherwise. Mycroft Holmes didn’t take his brother’s temperature or bathe him or change his clothes or hold his head when he was being sick or his hand when he was having nightmares or… any of it. And Greg did. And more. His best mate (other than John Watson, who was, to be honest, just ripping) was a drug addict with the most muddled, horrific past that anyone could wish (or not) on someone else, but he was also the most brilliant, and passionate, and entertaining, and loving (in his own way) person Greg had ever, EVER met, and fuck it if it wasn’t his job to take care of that man when he was so hurting, so broken, that he didn’t even always recognize the other people who were trying to help him.  
  
Oh, right. Depending on Sherlock’s temperature and state of mind, he might not recognize his own brother.  
  
“That might have been A Bit Not Good,” John offered. “Maybe I should…”  
  
Greg closed his eyes and nodded. Yes, maybe he should.  
  
John ran toward the bedroom just as the shouting started.  
  
*  
  
“He’s gone, now, Sherlock. It’s all right,” Greg said for the tenth or twenty-first or possibly thousandth time.  
  
Sherlock shook his head furiously, his sweat-soaked curls getting into his eyes, which were wide open in shock. He was folded up, his thighs pressed tightly to his heaving chest and his arms in a death grip around his knees. He was rocking and whimpering in abject terror. John sat behind him, holding him firmly by the shoulders, and Greg sat on the bed in front of him. He reached a shaking hand up and tried to brush the wild fringe away.  
  
“It’s all right, Greg,” John soothed.  
  
“I’m so sorry. I shouldn’t have sent him in here,” the older man gasped.  
  
“No, it’s not your fault. There was no way of knowing how he’d react. It was a crap shoot, and to be honest, Mycroft needed to see that.”  
  
Sherlock coughed.  
  
“Okay, Sherlock. Lean back. Relax. It’s fine now. You’re safe. You’re here with me and Lestrade. No one else.”  
  
“He… he…” the shaking man attempted, unable to speak without coughing. He looked wildly around the room.  
  
“He’s not here anymore. Greg, will you go get his cough mixture and the paracetamol, please?” Greg nodded and went to get the bottles.  
  
The doctor took a deep breath and leaned back against Sherlock’s headboard, pulling the thin man back with him. “Come on now. You’re safe.”  
  
“He… he’ll hurt me.”  
  
“No. No, he will not. I am a badass army captain and I will not let him hurt you ever again.”  
  
“You used a bad word,” Sherlock commented, and John realized with a chill that Sherlock sounded like an eight-year-old, more or less. All right. If that was the case, then that is how they would treat him until he came back to himself.  
  
“Yes, I did. I’m sorry about that,” he murmured into the back of Sherlock’s head.  
  
“I want juice.”  
  
“And some Tizer?” John called down the hall. “Lestrade is bringing it,” he added soothingly.  
  
When the D.I. returned, he had the two bottles of medicine in one hand and a bottle of Tizer in the other. Sherlock immediately put his hand over his mouth and shook his head vigorously. “No. No medicine. I want juice!” he pouted through his fingers. Greg’s eyes opened wide. _Humour him_ , John mouthed over his shoulder.  
  
“You have to take your medicine, and then you can have your juice,” John said aloud.  
  
“Dad gives me juice,” Sherlock commented indistinctly, his long, white fingers still covering his mouth.  
  
“And he has you take medicine when you need it, doesn’t he?” Sherlock didn’t respond. “I’ve seen him give you medicine to make you feel better. No one likes it when you’re feeling ill.” Sherlock considered this, then nodded and took his hands away from his mouth. Greg dosed him quickly, then cracked open the bottle of juice.  
  
“Can you hold it yourself?” he asked.  
  
“Of course I can!” Sherlock insisted. John shook his head at Greg and reached around to take the bottle. He held it gently to his friend’s lips and allowed him to have a few sips.  
  
“Good job,” the doctor commented. “Was that enough for now? How about some more sleep?” Sherlock nodded wearily and John slid out from behind him, easing him down onto the pillows. They both crept out of the room.  
  
“God, John, I don’t know how much more of this I can take,” Greg groaned, collapsing on the sofa with his eyes shut. The shorter man’s response made them snap back open.  
  
“And I don’t think we should.”  
  
*  
  
“What I’m saying is that he doesn’t need to _remember._ ”  
  
“John…” Mary’s voice, small and tinny, issued from the speaker on John’s mobile.  
  
“No, hear me out. We’ve been working on the wrong end of things. What he’s been doing is _recalling_ the abuse—usually as a reaction to something that triggers it—but then he doesn’t _remember._ He recalls things in his sleep, when he’s ill, when he’s stressed.”  
  
“Yeah…” Greg agreed, not knowing where this was going.  
  
“And we’ve been pushing him to hold onto those thoughts—to remember them when he’s coherent. Which is nearly impossible—you know how hard it is to remember a dream.”  
  
“Well, yeah…”  
  
“Why?” John demanded.  
  
“Why? You mean, _why_ are we trying to get him to remember?” Mary’s voice was puzzled.  
  
“Exactly. It’s clearly not doing him any good,” John stated firmly. Both Greg and Mary made noises of acquiescence.  
  
“But won’t remembering those things help him…” Greg started. He shook his head. “No. What you’re saying is that maybe it’s better to not make him remember?”  
  
“Yes, exactly. Right now, he’s acting like a child. A terrified child. If you came across a real child going through that sort of abuse and acting that way, would you push— _demand_ —that the child tell you everything that had happened?”  
  
“God, no. That would be awful!” Greg blurted out. “I mean, you’d have to get them to talk about it—to find out what happened, I mean—but you wouldn’t _force_ it.”  
  
“Oh, God,” Mary murmured. “That’s what we’ve been doing, isn’t it? He’s been recalling things on his own, but we’ve been forcing him to… try to… _retain_ them…” her voice caught and she stopped.  
  
“And it’s too much,” John finished for her. “We have to remember that the abuse occurred when he was a child. I think that… when he recalls something, it’s…” he fumbled over his words, distraught. Greg and Mary waited for him to collect himself. He finally took a deep breath and squared his shoulders. “It’s as if he’s experiencing it again, as a child. We can’t expect him to react to it as an adult.”  
  
“So, what do we do?” Greg asked quietly.  
  
“Nothing. I mean, obviously we continue to take care of him, and we’ve got to get him over the bronchitis, but the rest of it—no more file. No more talking. No more visits from his brother. No more questions. No more pushing him. If he wants to talk, we let him, but we don’t initiate any of it. If he needs us to test his food, we do it with no comment. Otherwise we start to treat him normally.”  
  
“But he’s recalling things all on his own. If we don’t know what his triggers are, how can we ever know how he’ll react to anything, or when?” Mary’s voice was tense.  
  
“We find out what the triggers are on our own,” John responded firmly.  
  
“How?” Mary demanded.  
  
“Oh, for fuck’s sake!” John replied caustically. “I’m a doctor. Ex-army captain. You were an… you have special training in certain areas. Greg’s a bloody Detective Inspector, for Christ’s sake. And Mycroft is… well. There will be information.”  
  
“Where? Medical records? He didn’t even tell his own mum what was going on. I’m sure that that bastard didn’t take him to the family doctor,” Greg puzzled aloud. He had glanced keenly at John when he had mentioned Mary’s background, but wisely realized it was neither the time nor place to pursue that.  
  
“When he was a child, no. He kept his mouth shut. I’m thinking about later.”  
  
“Later? Look. I’m exhausted. Can you please explain what you have in mind?” Greg dropped his head into his hands, then ran his fingers through his short hair with a groan.  
  
“Yeah, I know. I’m sorry. Look… he’s gone through phases, right? With the drugs, the mania, the nightmares. There have been times when he’s fine, like when I first met him, right? But then there’s been times when he’s been a right mess.”  
  
“Very true…” Greg said slowly, recalling with painful clarity more than one time that Sherlock had been very much not all right. “How does that… oh! We’ve got to find out who he might have been with when he was having nightmares and remembering… recalling things. Find out what he was talking about so we can get a better idea of what might trigger him?”  
  
“Exactly.” John sat back.  
  
“Who?” Greg asked.  
  
“We hit anyone close to him. His parents. Mycroft. Mrs Hudson. Molly. Mike Stamford. Billy. Anyone who might have seen him when he was… out of it.”  
  
“So if he can’t or won’t remember…” Mary said slowly.  
  
John nodded. “We find people who can remember for him.”  
  
 _All lives end._  
  
“Did you hear something?” John asked Greg sharply.  
  
“I… yeah, I think so. I’ll go—” but John was already up, tossing his mobile at the startled Detective Inspector.  
  
“John?” the concern in Mary’s voice was apparent even over the speaker.  
  
“Sherlock said something. He’s gone to check on him.”  
  
“Greg,” she said slowly. “Is he all right? John, I mean.”  
  
“God, Mary. Truth be told, he was probably less stressed when he was in Afghanistan. Up until this moment, actually.”  
  
“What do you mean?”  
  
“I mean, this plan of his—to find out what happened to Sherlock without forcing him to remember it—I think he’s right.”  
  
“He better be—for his own sake. And mine. And yours.”  
  
“And Sherlock’s.”  
  
Mary rang off without another word, but Greg heard her begin to sob. He hit ‘end call.’


	20. The Cold Light of Day

It was nightmarish and awful. John and Greg nearly came to blows over who would confront Mycroft. John won.  
  
“You knew _exactly_ what was happening! I know he had at least one phone conversation with you. He was hiding in your room, begging you to come home because your father had been cutting him…”  
  
“It was a long time ago, doctor…”  
  
“There are some things you don’t forget,” John spat back coldly.  
  
John drank half a bottle of whisky that night and woke up sick as a dog. _How the hell did Harry do it?_ he wondered as he vacillated between lying pathetically on the sofa and kneeling in front of the toilet.  
  
*  
  
Mary took on the task of asking—pleading with—his parents. She came home shaken and weepy and wouldn’t put the baby down for the rest of the evening.  
  
John sent a large fruit basket as a thank you. He wondered if they ate a single bit or if they threw it all away. That’s what he would have done.  
  
*  
  
John sat at Mrs Hudson’s small kitchen table and wanted to drown himself in herbal soothers as her gentle, hesitant voice created pictures in his head that he could never, even if he tried to, delete. He walked slowly back up to flat B wondering how the fuck some humans could be so cruel—so savage—so _inhumane_. John was not a particularly religious man, but now he prayed fervently that there was a Hell and that Mr Hudson was down there being slowly roasted, day after day, for eternity.  
  
*  
  
Martha Hudson remained seated at her kitchen table, her mouth pursed tight. She worried the tea cozy in her hands, staring at the doorway that John had just stepped through on his way back up to flat B. A hard look slowly stole across her usually pleasant features. It was a foreign look for anyone who knew her now, but one that Mr Hudson had known all too well. She tried—she did—to make light of it all, but when it came down to it, she had done an idiotic thing to marry such a horrible man. The fact that she wouldn’t ever have known Sherlock if she hadn’t married him crossed her mind. And the fact that what her husband had done to the young man was more than likely part of his nightmares now made her feel sick. It all spun around in her head until she moaned aloud and realized that she had torn the tea cozy into shreds.  
  
*  
  
Molly sent Greg a very long e-mail, explaining that she just couldn’t say certain things out loud. She had composed it in the evenings, slowly, over two weeks, and had had to stop for a few days because her stomach had twisted up and she couldn’t concentrate at work to the extent that she had nearly gotten two livers mixed up.  
  
What Molly Hooper had learned about Sherlock Holmes in the few days he had had to stay hidden in her tidy flat after his “fall,” before Mycroft could arrange his transportation to the continent, had started out as a fantasy for her and ended up as a nightmare, and after two nights of listening to him as he mumbled and ranted in his sleep, she had never been able to think about him the same way again. It had made it easier when he left—that was true—and it had made it much easier to keep his secret the few times she had seen John and Greg and Mrs Hudson—because the pathologist had finally seen through the mystique of the “consulting detective” to the very real, very raw human being beneath the surface, and that very real, very raw person evoked not awe, but sympathy. Something she was quite aware that Sherlock abhorred.  
  
*  
  
Billy Wiggins reached out to his old contacts, skillfully drawing out stories of the “mad man rantings” of one Shezza and adding his own. He related them one evening to Greg and John sitting in a pub a few blocks away from Baker Street, and his usually optimistic face (because for a homeless, unemployed ex-addict, he was a remarkably positive man) was drawn. Because he genuinely liked Shezza and was fascinated by his deductions and flattered when his own were occasionally praised. The drug habit was obviously not an obstacle to him; nor was the biting sarcasm or the ripping insults.  
  
He had learned very quickly that a blanket firmly pulled up and tucked around him often quieted him when he thrashed on a reeking mattress. That him breaking glass was never, ever all right; no matter how accidental, the act was likely to throw the man nearly into hysterics. That he’d shoot up or swallow pretty much anything, but no one had ever witnessed him eating anything. Ever.  
  
Similar, nauseatingly familiar stories came from all quarters, and Billy, who had started out wanting to be an architect, shared them with the light-haired doctor (who still made him flinch sometimes) and the D.I. (who assured him that narcotics was not his division) as he gladly sipped the steaming hot coffee they had gotten for him.  
  
*  
  
John let Greg talk to Sebastian Wilkes mainly because it would be fun to have someone joining him in hating the pompous git. Greg came back from that interview in complete agreement and with a page of notes and a few additional names to contact.  
  
*  
  
Seb Wilkes poured himself a large brandy and downed it in two gulps. He shuddered as it burned his throat, his nose, and his eyes. None of his usual expensive stuff tonight; he had stumbled out of his office after his interview with the grey-haired Scotland Yard man and bought the cheapest crap he could find. He felt like he deserved the burning; that he deserved what was very likely to be his worst hangover ever the next day. He poured another two fingers into his glass, splashing some onto his £4,000 dining room table. Fuck it, he thought. The maid would deal with it.  
  
God, what had they been thinking back in uni? It was all a joke to them, wasn’t it? It had been to him, that was certain. Even a few years ago, when he had been obliged to call the odd man in as an actual consultant, he had laughed long and hard afterward at his exaggerated mannerisms; his stiff posture and scowl and eccentric hair and coat. And that… colleague? _Friend_? Who did they think they were kidding? He had even chuckled when the D.I. had first entered his office and announced what he was after. Memories of Holmes? Why? At first he glibly recounted his favorite stories—Holmes deducing a don’s affair with another don; Holmes being accused of cheating on his exams until he had proven that his answer to a particular question was correct and the designer of the exam was wrong.  
  
Holmes forming a sort of relationship with someone—who was it? Chap named Victor something. They had been a sort of item for a bit—their first year, actually. But then Holmes visited Victor during the long vac and had returned to school without him. Seb had figured Victor had finally gotten sick of the weirdo, but then he had heard from him. Victor’s father had died, and he had to take care of his business or something. Holmes never mentioned him again, and his formal schooling hadn’t lasted much longer either. Fucking poofters, both of them. Disgusting.  
  
What was his full name? the D.I. had asked in a growl. Huh. Bit odd reaction, that, Seb had thought. Victor… Seb wracked his brain. Victor Trevor. That was it. The D.I. wrote that down as Seb frowned at the little notebook that had been produced from the rumpled coat.  
  
And as the D.I. pushed him and pushed him to remember more, Sebastian Wilkes began to realize that apparently Sherlock Holmes was not the only person who “deleted” unpleasant memories.  
  
Someone pointing out that Holmes hadn’t been seen eating anything in four or five days. On more than one occasion.  
  
Holmes stiffly refusing a drink at a party (and God knew why he had appeared at the party to begin with), then retreating to a quiet room (in which Seb had been trying to get lucky with a local bird) and taking out a syringe, exposing a track-marked forearm in the semi-darkness as the bird flew the coop and the dark-haired youth pinned Seb in place with his piercing eyes, calmly deducing Seb’s unfortunate case of… a social disease while simultaneously and efficiently shooting up, then demanding a cigarette from him.  
  
Whose party was it? A bird… a young woman. A flute player. Holmes had played violin with her, he recalled. Some classical stuff. Not that he was ever into that highbrow crap himself, but apparently they had made quite an impression. Helen Stoner–that was her name. No, it was Roylott now.  
  
Someone finding Holmes in the lab, stretched out unconscious under the long table, an extremely intricate and delicate experiment of some sort neatly completed on the table above him, and a blue notebook full of his spidery, scrawled notes with the pen still on it.  
  
And just before the Christmas break their second year, when Seb had woken up at about three o’clock in the morning to the sound of sobbing and discovered a far-too-thin and completely strung-out Sherlock ripping down the Christmas decorations and shouting something about—about—  
  
 _I’m sorry, Father. I just wanted to decorate a bit. I made them myself. Mycroft showed me how to cut the snowflakes and Mummy told me how to make the popcorn chains. Please don’t tear them down. I wanted Father Christmas to see them. No! I’ll put them in my room! No! Not the fireplace. Please, no!_  
  
Oh, God.  
  
The D.I. had left at that point, not thanking him and not shaking his hand. And Seb Wilkes left his office early for once, seeking solace in a bottle of rot.  
  
*  
Mike Stamford reluctantly shared a few stories with John involving late nights and early mornings at the lab at Bart’s, his usually sunny face tight and drawn. At this point some of the elements were becoming nauseatingly familiar: breaking any type of glass terrified the man, even when he tried to hide his reaction with indifference or vitriol; refusing food and even water when he was known to have been in the lab for 24 hours straight. Mike had never knowingly witnessed Sherlock high, but as he talked with his old friend, he realized that a great deal of the man’s most eccentric behavior had certainly occurred while under the influence of one thing or another.  
  
Mike went home, kissed his wife, and scooped up his son, holding him so tightly that the little boy squirmed. “I love you, and you are the most precious thing in the world to me,” he whispered to him before he deposited him on the floor and sat next to him to help him finish building Batman’s secret hideaway from his building blocks, adding some potholders to make a cozy bed for the dark crime fighter and his trusty sidekick, Robin.  
  
*  
  
Even Angelo was a help, offering his observations of what foods Sherlock would and would not touch; what cases he had shared in celebration and which had shaken him. His usually booming voice dropped to a hoarse whisper as he told the handsome D.I. about a few nights on which he had had to make the young man stop, so shaken had he become by the tales of horrific kidnappings gone wrong; children abused or neglected. Sure, Angelo was a housebreaker—he never denied it—but the idea of hurting anyone, especially a child, turned his stomach and apparently Sherlock’s as well.  
  
“But it wasn’t always like that. When a case went well—we celebrated! That was the only time I saw him drink more than one or two glasses of wine,” he confided as they sat at the table at the front window. “He’s not a big drinker, you know.” Greg nodded, not bothering to hide a smile. “But one night—Lord—we finished two bottles of wine between the two of us, and I only had three glasses myself. I had to get him a cab. But what was odd was…” he paused and wiped his forehead with one broad hand.  
  
“Yeah?” Greg encouraged, sipping his own wine ( _Anything for a friend of Sherlock’s! On the house!_ Angelo had pressed on him before asking how he was; was he all right? He made his favorite dishes and sent them ‘round when that nice Dr Watson called, but he hadn’t seen him in ages and had been worried).  
  
“It was one of the only times I think I’ve ever seen him… calm. He got relaxed and actually—don’t tell him I told you this—sort of nice and…” he stopped himself.  
  
“Nice and…?” Greg prompted, taking a mouthful of the wine.  
  
“He made a pass at my waiter,” Angelo finally spit out. Greg nearly mirrored this with his mouthful of wine.  
  
*  
  
Mary helped John go back over all his blogs and emails, pushing both of them to remember any comments they had made to each other. She also dutifully recorded all the stories that everyone else shared with them, her mouth clamped into a thin, grim line. After each session she would take the baby for a walk, pushing her in her chair ferociously, walking, walking, walking, sometimes for hours.  
  
*  
  
It was nightmarish and awful. It was exhausting and nauseating. And it took over a month.  
  
And in that month, John and Greg gave up their permanent residence at 221B. At first, Mrs Hudson and the elder Holmeses and Molly and Billy took turns staying with him when they or Mary couldn’t be there, but as his fevers abated and his cough finally began to improve, they found that they could leave him alone for short periods of time. Mycroft and Lestrade both sent him occasional files to review; to give him something to do. He rarely left the flat, but Mrs Hudson did his laundry and bought him groceries and once (and she called John in tears of joy) reported that she had caught him making himself some eggy toast for dinner.  
  
The case file—the real one—was buried in a basement archive somewhere in London and even Greg couldn’t say for sure where, as Mycroft had been the one to attend to that.  
  
Several times Sherlock went out at night with Billy. He would be covered from head to toe in cuts and bruises the next day, and there would be a several hundred pounds in cash on the coffee table. After these outings he would sleep soundly and eat voraciously, so John figured that ignorance was bliss and never asked for an explanation.  
  
Finally, one day, Greg took a deep breath and sent him some photos from a live crime scene. He had struggled with the decision to do so, calling John twice, reviewing the details of the case, trying to figure out if it held any triggers. They had decided it didn’t (apparently Sherlock’s childhood experiences did not—thankfully—include any red-headed men or a shop assistant with a penchant for “odd” photography) and Sherlock had solved the case after grabbing a cane from a flabbergasted passer-by to bang on the street outside the victim’s building and then getting John to sit with him in a dark basement for hours awaiting the suspect.  
  
He eventually did a few experiments with the alarmingly pink nail varnish, then used the rest of it and some oddments around the flat to make a mobile for the baby’s room. It took a week to air out the place, but it was worth it when Mary sent him a photo of it hanging above her cot, captioned “Thank you Uncle Sherlock!” That made him smile shyly and show Mrs Hudson, who patted his shoulder lovingly before she went to switch on the kettle, wiping a bit of moisture from the corners of her eyes.  
  
One day John got a disgruntled call from Mycroft wondering what he was doing to keep Sherlock amused, as he had gotten a text from him every five minutes for the past two hours, each of which was accompanied by a different photo of some type of cake.  
  
John laughed himself sore and told Mycroft he was on his own.  
  
*  
  
A banner day. Mary and John were taking Sherlock and the baby to his parents’ for dinner.  
  
“Mycroft is not invited,” the younger brother had announced, and John giggled a bit at the elation in his voice. Sherlock had tucked his violin in the boot and complimented Mary on the new changing bag. (Well, it was a Sherlock-skewed compliment, so it involved the ease with which certain bodily fluids could be removed from various fabrics, but she took it in the vein in which it was intended.)  
  
Mr and Mrs Holmes were both outside to greet them as they pulled up, waving happily at the entire crew. Mr Holmes swooped in and scooped the baby from her seat, gracefully unfastening the belt and swinging her high in the air. She laughed and waved her arms.  
  
Violet Holmes gave both Mary and John hugs, and then she paused. Sherlock, who had seated himself in the back seat next to the baby and had not said a word since they had turned the corner from Baker Street (John, who was driving, had glanced worriedly at him in the mirror a few times, wondering if he was getting car sick), had emerged from the far side of the car and was now somewhat shyly getting his violin and the baby’s bag out of the boot. She looked him up and down with her sharp eyes, so like his, then took the few steps she needed to bring herself next to her younger son. She reached out and gently touched his elbow.  
  
“Hello, ‘lock,” she said quietly. “I’ve missed you.”  
  
“You’ve seen me,” he responded, fussing with the zip on the bag. “And we just spoke three days ago.”  
  
“Not like this. You’re going to play for us, hmm?” She nodded at the case.  
  
“Mmm. Yes. Something for the baby.”  
  
“That’s my boy,” she murmured. “And I’ve got all your favorites for dinner and lovely pudding for afters.”  
  
He turned his head just enough to peer at her through his unruly curls, his eyes narrowing. “Angel-hair pasta in a light alfredo sauce with nutmeg, sausage, green beans with almond slivers, mashed potatoes that Mary won’t eat because she’s slimming, middling to fair wine brought by the Watsons, and… oh, a cheese course with…” he inhaled deeply… “apple and orange slices.”  
  
“And?” she prompted.  
  
“Banoffee pie, I should think.”  
  
“I really should have worn an apron,” she commented drily, and he grinned at her—a genuine, warm smile that crinkled the corners of his eyes.  
  
*  
  
Dinner was exactly as deduced, and John pushed back from the table happily patting his stomach. “That was amazing, Violet,” he declared.  
  
“Oh, I didn’t do it all,” she demurred. “Dad is handy around the kitchen.”  
  
“Only for slicing things up,” Paul Holmes added. “I daren’t go near a sauce. I apparently do not possess the ‘whisking’ gene.”  
  
Mary laughed at this and stood up, beginning to gather the used plates. She got to Sherlock’s and smiled fondly at it. It was empty. She knew he hadn’t even attempted the sausage, but that was all right. “Good job,” she whispered to him. “Now, help me with the washing up.” The consulting detective grunted, but rose and began to gather the water glasses.  
  
Water glasses—John surprised himself by tearing up as he watched. He leaned over and kissed his daughter, who was perched in her carrier on the table.  
  
“Backgammon?” Paul asked him.  
  
“Certainly.”  
  
*  
  
“Oh! I nearly forgot. I got something for the baby,” Violet exclaimed. She had just settled down on the sofa.  
  
“I’ll get it,” Sherlock said. He was standing at the door to the kitchen, drying his hands.  
  
“It’s in the… oh, right,” Violet interrupted herself when she realized that she didn’t need to tell her son where she had stashed the gift. “Creature of habit, I am,” she laughed as he swooped over to a cupboard on the side of the fireplace.  
  
Sherlock gave a medium-sized shipping package to Mary, who was seated next to Violet, and picked up the baby, holding her so she faced her mummy. He murmured something encouraging into her tiny pink ear.  
  
“Oh, that’s fantastic!” Mary exclaimed. She held up the item from the shipping package.  
  
“What is that?” John asked.  
  
“It’s a ‘Mozart Magical Cube’,” Sherlock told the baby. “It plays eight compositions.” He handed the baby to his mother and, taking the item from Mary, removed the cube from its packaging. Still addressing the baby, he continued. “It plays harp, flute, French horn, piano, and violin together or independently.” He popped in the batteries. “Here. You press on the buttons.” He handed the baby the cube and demonstrated. Lights flashed. Music played. The baby nearly tumbled out of his mother’s lap, squealing with joy.  
  
“In theory the music of Mozart improves spatial-temporal tasks in infants, and it’s safe for newborns,” Sherlock added belatedly, aiming his comment at the baby’s parents.  
  
“It’s wonderful!” Mary cooed.  
  
“Obviously Sherlock picked it out,” Violet commented. “I asked him what I should get.”  
  
“It’s really lovely.”  
  
“When she’s older she can have the periodic table of elements building blocks,” Sherlock blurted out.  
  
“Of course she can,” John smiled gently.  
  
Mary glanced down into the shipping package. “Oh, there’s more!” She reached in and pulled out a book. “ _Experimenting with Babies: 50 Amazing Science Projects You Can Perform on Your Kid,_ ” she read in a somewhat stunned voice. “Well, that’s…”  
  
“Sherlock, won’t you play for us now?” Paul interceded.  
  
“What? Oh, all right.”  
  
And Sherlock played his composition for the baby, and some of John’s favorites, and then some of Mary’s and his mother’s and his dad’s, and Mary discretely slid the book under the sofa with her foot before they sat back at the table for coffee and pie.


	21. Brighter than the Sun

Sherlock Holmes wasn’t speaking to John or Mary. This was rather blissful.  
  
He wasn’t speaking to them because at the moment he had his face buried in the belly of one Miss Watson, murmuring endearments and equations into her soft cotton sleep suit. She for her part was cooing contentedly and kicking her toes out happily. She grabbed two fistfuls of dark curls and pulled. He chuckled in delight, not immediately untangling them—just breathing her in.  
  
John wrapped himself around his wife, peering at the happy scene over her shoulder. Her smile was so broad that her eyes were nearly shut. She sniffed.  
  
“Isn’t that lovely,” Mrs Hudson murmured behind them.  
  
“It is,” John agreed.  
  
“Are you all ready for our holiday?” he was asking the baby, finally pulling back to observe her. “I’ve planned out some really interesting sites to visit and we don’t even have to leave London.”  
  
“Not ‘til next week,” Mary warned. “And I thought leaving London was part of the deal.”  
  
“I know. John has to work at that awful surgery.” Sherlock rolled his crystal-clear eyes.  
  
“As do I.”  
  
“Dull. And not London? I’m sure I can find some interesting murder locations in, say, Edinburgh?”  
  
“Edinburgh is fine. Sure. Oodles of stuff to do there, and I’m sure I can find a nice place to stay. Now, what are you going to do with this week?” Mary inquired casually.  
  
“Mmm… not sure. I was considering experimenting with some belladonna…”  
  
And Sherlock’s mobile buzzed. The baby squealed. Frowning, he pulled it from his pocket, stroking the baby’s head with the other hand. He glanced at it, his frown gradually being replaced by… well, John realized right then that that particular expression had no name—it belonged to Sherlock Holmes alone.  
  
The consulting detective slid his mobile back into his pocket rapidly. “Well, little one, our talk will have to wait. Triple homicide—two women and one man—posed after death. I do _love_ those. John, who is ‘Bob Fosse’?”  
  
‘“Who?” John responded, already unwrapping himself from his wife.  
  
“Never mind. I’ll find out in the cab. Mrs Hudson, my coat! Come on, John. What are you waiting for? The Game Is On!” And he was off down the stairs in a flurry of Belstaff coat and blue scarf. John gave his wife a quick kiss and ran down after him, a huge grin on his face.  
  
Sherlock was back. John couldn’t get over it.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Regarding ADHD and childhood trauma: “Dr. Nicole Brown’s quest to understand her misbehaving pediatric patients began with a hunch. Brown was completing her residency at Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore, when she realised that many of her low-income patients had been diagnosed with attention deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD).”  
> Rebecca Ruiz. “How Childhood Trauma Could Be Mistaken for ADHD.” Jul 7 2014, 9:15 AM ET. http://m.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2014/07/how-childhood-trauma-could-be-mistaken-for-adhd/373328/  
> Regarding how Ritalin works: http://www.netdoctor.co.uk/adhd/medicines/ritalin.html#ixzz38u9iYEja

**Author's Note:**

> Thank you to http://arianedevere.livejournal.com for the online episode transcripts.


End file.
